I’ve been playing Breath of the Wild while I’m lying flat and my experience is identical to that of Craig here. All the way back to the gold cartridge I used to have for the NES as a kid.
It’s super lovely that Berlin has a lab which does these kind of user tested innovations on city processes. The work that needs to be done is written up here and it’s relatively straight-forward (there are just no short-cuts).
Not all the answers here are perfect but it’s a good test for logical reasoning. Without logical reasoning nothing is possible (as you can probably see ample examples of in your environment).
You need to use your time differently. You need to rise above the work. You need to figure out how to make yourself less busy with your current workload to make room to do higher-value work. No one will do this for you.
I’m not sure what lesson to take from the Frankenstein end state of the Facebook iOS app. Is it that mobile does not really scale? Or is it that you shouldn’t scale mobile in this way?
One of my favorite new podcasts is Oxide and Friends which is a weekly live show that’s technically very deep, focused on #Rust, morally opinionated and funny.
One state, BW, in Germany took the opportunity with the reform of the property taxes to implement something like a Land Value Tax (at a very moderate 1.3‰ rate) and it is doing exactly what it should be doing.
The Fly.io write-up of how they built their own orchestrator is a wild ride and also contains a crash-course introduction into how to schedule workloads at (non)scale.
A good overview of the protections that Rust offers compared to out in the wild C code based on the audit of the git source code. In short: if you write idiomatic Rust, you get a lot of protection.
A reasonable enough rationale to choose Java in this article. Am I missing out if I never built a serious backend on the current Spring/Boot JVM (and never seen a team outside of the consulting space use it)?
Going through these presentations by Matt Jones the main thing I’m left wondering is if anybody still does any real design and thinking work anymore, when it comes to technology or if all of it now is just flinging shit against the wall (which it very much looks like).
It would be fitting if the tech layoffs would take some big bites out of the boundary of the firm and move us to more dynamic working arrangements. Unfortunately a country like Germany with its rigid social security is incredibly hostile to most such arrangements.
I read this thorough survey of monospace fonts by Tim Bray and found out in the end that I’ve already been using the fonts that he recommends (Jetbrains Mono and Inconsolata) for a while now.
It is beyond funny that the right wing conspiracy theorists have latched onto the idea of creating liveable, walkable cities as the next threat to humanity.
A thorough explanation why building UI frameworks in Rust is uniquely difficult (and why we haven’t seen clear victories for Rust in that domain… yet).
“When Jake Knapp was running those design thinking workshops at Google, he saw that for all the excitement and Post-its they generated, the brainstorming sessions didn’t usually lead to built products or, really, solutions of any kind.”
The next bit of insanity has to do with the German Datenschutz nutters. This is a small but virulent group of people who have blown up privacy issues to the point where most of Germany is still afraid to use the internet.
Discord has been executing near perfectly and it looks like they’ve built-in most of the functionality of Discourse now. That’s an absolutely amazing complementary feature to the ephemerality of the chat stream.
It’s understandable that organizations try to make their word legible and simplify things. In fact, it’s one of the reasons for the organizational boundary.
A nice article about Box’s transformation and especially that chart contrasting burn v. growth is one of the most important things for any startup to keep in mind.
I use a graph based note taking tool (foam) and I am to yet derive any kind of value from the graph (other than some minor visual oohs and aahs). It’s vastly oversold and I don’t want to think about all the time people have wasted tidying and linking up their notes.
As a company scales, there are phase shifts which feel like they suck all the productivity out of an organization. The way to get through as described here is familiar: categorize and capture everything, reduce WIP and loop through your process.
A lot to like in this article (“They avoid scrum and SAFe like the plague.”) but I’ll settle for adopting the core thrust of it and just retiring the entire concept of a PO and never have to debate “What is the difference between a PM and a PO?” ever again.
Since the one digital thing that Germany is really good at is copying, here is the UK’s 2025 roadmap for digital and data. Just copy-paste it and do everything that’s in there.
Ilya Grigorik notes down a perspective on what people at the higher senior+ levels should be doing. At that level things can get fuzzy and people tend to struggle.
The past couple of weeks I had a bit of a weird feeling because there weren’t any new episodes from Piratensender Powerplay. Then I found out Friedemann is out sick but also that they have a Patreon with extra episodes.