Weekend Reading — Let that sink in


Cute Baby Animals "This is the best thing on the internet today."

Design Objective

H Λ N И Λ H Is your product useful or entertaining?

Designing for trust > delight

The rest of the world outside of the tech bubble could care less about 'delight'. They care that products deliver what they promise and that ppl on the other side of an interface understand their needs

Jared Spool I think it's an issue of design maturity, see above (useful vs entertaining):

Key phrases, missing from practically every portfolio case study I read:

• The challenge we ran into was…
• I realized we didn’t understand…
• Our first attempt to address this challenge was…
• We learned these critical things we never knew about our users…

The Most Important Rule in UX Design that Everyone Breaks TL;DR "When it comes to completing tasks, less is more."

The logos that have become legends Guess which logo they're talking about?

“I like to think that eventually someone will be digging on planet earth in the distant future and they’ll find something with that symbol on it.

Assaf "My two favorite features: “submit unsubscribe” and “please allow 10 business days” to unsubscribe"


Tools of the Trade

Joe Chung Please, and can it come sooner? "Love this quote from @Werner #reinvent"


Introducing AWS Fargate – Run Containers without Managing Infrastructure Meanwhile, we get: "Like EC2 but instead of giving you a virtual machine you get a container."

Amazon EC2 Bare Metal Instances with Direct Access to Hardware
Or if you need every inch of control, EC2 instances that "gives you direct access to the processor and other hardware."

Debugging React performance with React 16 and Chrome Devtools "All major browsers support the User Timing API, but Chrome’s performance tab goes a long way further to make debugging a React application a whole lot easier."


Truly Seamless Reloads with HAProxy – No More Hacks! From which I learned a few things about the TCP/IP stack, routing betweem processes, and draining connections.

Paper Signals are build-it-yourself objects that you control with your voice Some assembly required.


Zoe Hong Every. Time.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the fastest way to find errors is to hit "send" or "print"

Lingua Scripta

Native Pattern Matching for Javascript A switch on steroids:

const { matches } = require('z')

const result = matches(1)(
  (x = 2)      => 'number 2 is the best!!!',
  (x = Number) => `number ${x} is not that good`,
  (x = Date)   => 'blaa.. dates are awful!'

An Introduction to Speculative Optimization in V8 Peek into the internals of V8's TurboFan.


Lines of Code

Joe Armstrong "Once you understand a problem …"

I keep telling people "programming is understanding" - the computer is a machine that tests if your ideas are correct.


Chris Fritz Like, maybe a rubber duck?

Coding tip: If you've been stuck for an hour, reach out for help immediately (even to someone who might know less about the problem than you do).

It's amazing how much another pair of eyes can help, as it forces you to break down and explain the problem.

Jim Wallace Explain MVP to me, like I'm over-engineering this piece of code:

You should write software as if no one is going to use it and you don't want to do it. 9 times out of 10 you'll be right so do the simplest possible thing that can work until you have evidence that it's useful.


JBD ⚖️

Good engineering is less about finding the "perfect" solution and more about understanding the tradeoffs and being able to explain them.

amy nguyen This is why we can't have nice things:

i wrote a talk about designing user-friendly infra tools

i found out that infra people were less likely to attend the talk because the title had "design" in it

i think i found the problem y'all

Bascht 🤣 "…so… …basically what developers have been doing the whole time?"



scottish foldl 🤔

me: meetings where no-one is paying attention, won’t matter with or without laptops

Electric Sheep

Belinda Barnet This kid is going places!

5yo: I am building a semi ominous vehicle out of cardboard
Me: You mean semi autonomous
5yo: You don't understand my technology

Manos Tsakiris "AI struggling this , seen on @samim twitter profile picture"


Locked Doors

IOS 11 Horror Story: The Rise And Fall Of IOS Security TL;DR iOS 11 trades security for convenience: lose your password, and you lose access to your phone, backups, cloud accounts, even your computer can be tracked and wiped remotely.

Pro tip: You can log into macOS High Sierra as root with no password What's up Apple? Also this week in Apple bugs to watch out for: iPhone crashing on Dec. 2? Here's the fix!

Lukas Stefanko "TotallyNotAVirus.exe #MalwareUnpacking"

None of the Above

Keith Lee "This is an under appreciated bit of interaction that is only possible on Twitter."


Showerthoughts 🤣

Set your wifi password to itsonthefridge. Then enjoy watching visitors go and stare at your fridge for no reason.

One of my favorite thing I’ve learned about animals studies … 🤔

One of my favorite thing I’ve learned about animals studies is that you should avoid using colorful leg bands when you’re banding birds because you can accidentally completely skew the data because female birds prefer males with colorful bands

Apparently if you put a red band on a male red wing blackbird his harem size can double

So like you can completely frick up the natural reproduction of a group of birds by giving a guy a bracelet so stylish that females CANNOT resist him

Kyle Machulis 🔥

Naming things is one of the harder problems of computer science, but some people do it very, very well.


Autopsy of a Popular Quantum Computing Article TL;DR "It may never work at all or it may only be available to the wealthiest corporations. Nevertheless, promising a useful quantum computer in the next five to 10 years is a proud tradition of the last three decades."

Nebula Alarm Clock If you like astronomy and have a difficult time waking up in the morning.

Lindsey Bieda "congrats five-minute journal you played yourself"


Chimps Are No Chumps: Give Them An Oven, They'll Learn To Cook "But this is the first study showing that animals can acquire a cooking-like skill on their own."

Assaf The phone museum. Look at all these keyboards and sliders!


Sleep Walking into a War Three parts article about the Great Cyber War.

PJ Vogt "Wow. Let that sink in."


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