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6:15 - 6:30 Wake up, cuddle with SO and read in bed.
7:00 - 7:30 At work, make coffee in Aeropress, eat overnight oats for breakfast, read email.
7:30 - 11:15 Code/Document Work
11:15 - 11:30 Daily Scrum
11:30 - 13:00 Either Onsite Exercise Class + Run or Lunch with coworkers + walk around campus
13:00 - 13:15 Daily meeting with non software team members
13:15 - 15:30 Work
15:30 - Rest of day Go home, make dinner, sew/knit/pet cat/spend time with SO
I have more meetings than this schedule suggests, but they are mostly adhoc design meetings. I also have calls with India once a week, taken from home with my cat walking over my keyboard.
In the summer I work slightly longer in order to make time for bicycling my commute. More exercise = more tolerance for office nonsense.
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JKowalsky
6 months ago
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I made a free Chrome extension to highlight recipes on food blogs
You are a hero and a saint! SEO has absolutely overridden the user experience for food blogs.
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We have some generous crustaceans here!
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Yes we should also put up other causes throughout the year. Preferably amusing but also good causes. Lobster emoji is just the beginning!
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A provocative title, but pretty good content–especially how engineering tends to underestimate their time costs. And how we’re often bad at justifying the cost vs return of tools to management. A lot of the manager vs engineer headbutting I’ve seen results from talking past each other about the value of engineerings time being better spent here or there.
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Not nearly as much as management underestimates their time cost.
Want to subscribe to one of these services?
That takes money.
Any idea just how much engineering you can do for the time cost of engaging management to spend money (for the life time of their product)?
Any idea of how much fun it is for an engineer to do that?
And when you need to run up another service for something with a tight dead line?
And you lay out the schedule and you realise that by far the largest chunk of real time will be getting management to OK the spend?
And if you jump through all these hoops…. you look at the Version Control logs and realise that CEO’s come and go like mayflies but the code lives on and on… and you know for certain the service you bought will shutdown somewhere in the life of the code…. and everything you engineered to rely on it will die.
The first question I ask when I engineer a dependency is “Can I pull the source into my repo? Can I build it and debug it and patch it? Is there a viable/active upstream I can send patches, to that will respond and mainline them? Is there an active community around it? If upstream dies or goes a different way… will my code die or rumble on?”
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On the flip side, there is “Not Invented Here!” and “But my use case is 1% different than the standard use case, so I need to write my own version!” It’s all very organization dependent, of course, as to which ends up being the reason. And sometimes you do have to roll your own because that is the fastest route to completion.
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Technical:
- 24 Deadly Sins of Software Security
- Haskell Programming from First Principles
- The Leprechauns of Software Engineering
Work Required:
- The Speed of Trust
Personal: My GoodReads bookshelf
I set myself a goal of 50 books this year, with a focus on fiction and other enjoyable titles. I used to read a lot in middle and high school, but stopped during college. Figured this was a good year to kick back up the habit.
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A good reminder that a focus on your health–whether working remotely or in office–pays dividends on your personal and professional performance.
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[Comment removed by author]
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It struck an off note for me too, because I have seen so many amazing systems that represent totally different ideas about computing (Plan 9, Smalltalk, Prolog, APL), many of which happened to also have been developed by white dudes. I agree we need more ideas, even crazy ideas. I don’t see what that has to do with race and sex, but oh well. Maybe it engenders them to their audience.
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It’s not ~50/50 split in any of those companies.
- http://fortune.com/2017/06/29/google-2017-diversity-report/
- https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/diversity/inside-microsoft/default.aspx
- https://www.apple.com/diversity/
Besides, why would pointing out privileged people undermine the message when it’s one of the biggest problems in the IT culture right now? What is the politically correct bandwagon that you’re talking about?
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To save you a click:
Racial diversity at:
- Google is 55% white / 35% asian
- Microsoft is 56% / 31%
- Apple is 54% / 21%
I think the claim “mostly white” is clearly (if only just) true, by the numbers.
That said, given wikipedia puts asian-americans as 6.7% of population I’d also agree with the claim they are ‘dominating’ in tech given how overrepresented they are relative to population.
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It doesn’t raise a flag for me. I’m reminded of the male architect who designed glass stairs and put them in a building… forgetting that women sometimes wear skirts and would prefer not to have people below them be able to stare straight up them. The point is to recognize that solutions that work perfectly for white able bodied men are not necessarily solutions that work perfectly for everyone else, hence why a diversity of viewpoints is important. This is not to say that those solutions don’t work for everyone else, either. It’s just that more data makes for more robust solutions that please a larger population of users.
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ravicious gave you evidence that Asian people are not 50/50 with white people. The OP mentioned the single most dominant group in terms of sheer numbers. Not sure why acknowledging the factual demographic makeup of UI design teams in large tech organizations would discount the rest of the OP’s argument. As I stated in my example, diverse viewpoints can help round off design errors earlier–before they hit the public at large–so it’s not an off topic point to bring up, either.
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Nevertheless, the statement about white men being the largest group is technically correct (by 20% of the population, so not within the margin of error, either.) I still don’t understand your objection to pointing out the dominant group in UI design by numbers. Why is it so bad to acknowledge that fact?
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JKowalsky
8 months ago
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Lobsters, What Programming/Engineering Toys/Gifts do you Recommend for Children
You don’t mention gender of the child, so I’d like to throw in Goldie Blocks. They’re aimed at girls without being condescending. In general, I suggest books aimed at building scientific interest in kids less so than programming explicitly. I also agree with other commentators who mention tailoring more-so to the kid’s interests.
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Any interest in a crustacean private leaderboard?
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I guess competition is healthy, but I have an additional suggestion: crustacean private help board: I don’t know how we’d do it, one big “ask” story/thread would be difficult, we could set up a github project for it and have questions as “issues” perhaps? We could have a wiki on it too.
EDIT:
Also, the idea of a lobste.rs joint github additionally appeals to me because I know we all dabble in various esoteric languages and we could have a “rosetta code” type of project where we solve the problems in different languages, and it would be fun to compare these solutions across languages.
EDIT:
https://github.com/a-red-christmas
In case anyone thinks its a good idea … please join up
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I’m slowly chewing through the Haskell Book (about 200 pages in, 1000 left to go.) My goal is to be done with it by Christmas. In the meantime, work has me simplifying some legacy code. Cruising until the Christmas holidays.
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The heart of the issue here is a fundamental shift in user requirements. The end user driving requirements of social media has shifted from the people using the service to companies serving adware and data analytics (and government.) All the user hostile changes make perfect sense in this context–they simply mean that we have shifted from consumer to product.
Stanley merely noted that the user features aimed at him are no longer sufficient to overcome the detracting features aimed at improving the user experience of advertisement companies.
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That’s a fascinating perspective to bring up, in as much as you believe in an individual (or a corporations) environmental obligations to the planet.
This suggests that aside from increases in cost due to penalizing fossil fuels and embracing renewable energy, there may also be a development cost to overhaul infrastructure to be more energy efficient to mitigate the rising cost of energy. At least, in a rational world.
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MIT licence is sooo cool, multi billionaires company have work for free
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If they change it and distribute the changes, they have to release the source to the changes. Or pay for right not to. Project maintainers might get something useful out of it. They won’t if it’s permissively licensed in vast majority of cases where a change is made and distributed.
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Good point. Yeah, that be the case here.
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After 3 years on Evernote, I switched 1 years ago to TiddlyWiki. It is free and customizable.
Today I edit my “Tiddlers” inside Firefox and use the TiddlyFox Firefox extension to save it on my disk. Then I commit the changes in a private git repository.
I find it handy and effective
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Curious, will the move to WebExtensions cripple your usage? I just checked and it looks like the maintainers are at a loss for how to migrate given the lack of a save-to-file api. That uncertainty has prevented me from really adopting Tiddlywiki for general/desktop usage, even though it is very good on Firefox for Android.
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I’d be curious to know the flip side here– what notes do you usually take as the employee in one on ones?
In my case, I carry a black notebook that I scribble reminders in with me to most meetings. In one on ones, I generally try to write down the answers to the three questions (What am I doing well, what can I improve on, what should I stop doing?) I also like to ask about and keep track of projects in the pipeline.
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Currently rereading: Deep Work by Cal Newport. I facilitate a technical bookclub at my workplace, and this is the book we’re currently on. Not my favorite Cal book. I’d argue How to Make Straight A’s in College, while focused at college students, offers more practical tool and advice than Deep Work even for professionals.
Recently read The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin, which I highly recommend. Gretchen is flawed, methodical, and identifiable all at once. Her techniques for self examination and habit building I found very useful.
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JKowalsky
11 months ago
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Deliver software faster by managing work in progress, not by adding overtime
I like the quantitative approach they took to proving what many of us know intuitively–too wide of a pipeline overwhelms engineering. I wish they would talk about what lead their management to the point of being able to talk about the issue. Many organization’s management doubles down on “All tasks having highest priority,” so what made Soundcloud able to look at the work in the pipeline’s effect on their workers in the first place?
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This is your regular reminder that webfonts are terrible and you cannot use them to demonstrate your typeface because people who block them (i.e. everyone reasonable) will see one of their own fallback fonts. Take screenshots instead (without subpixel antialiasing, because—regular reminder—not everyone has horizontal RGB subpixels).
Granted, I pick fallback fonts I like, so this most likely improves my opinion of “your” typeface, but convincing me that I like fonts I like probably wasn’t the author’s intent.
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webfonts are terrible
You state this like it’s an objective fact. It’s not. It’s your evaluation of the utility of webfonts, likely only considering the use cases that you personally care about.
As someone with a bit of design inclination, I’d say that webfonts are a godsend as long as you use them correctly.
you cannot use them to demonstrate your typeface because people who block them (i.e. everyone reasonable) will see one of their own fallback fonts.
Casting yourself as one of a vanishingly small minority of reasonable people and implying that everyone else (almost everyone) is unreasonable isn’t a great way to make your point. And the point itself is debatable.
For most people, a webfont is the best way to preview the actual font under the actual conditions that it will be used: on their personal monitor, with their personal anti-aliasing settings.
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because people who block them (i.e. everyone reasonable)
You are casting everyone who disagrees with you as unreasonable—and that’s a collection of people who, at least currently, are the overwhelming majority of web users (which is why web fonts are used in the first place).
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Image formats have about a 20 year head start on processing hostile inputs. Font libraries were designed and written with the attitude, if you install a broken font and you don’t like, well, don’t do that and uninstall it. This is a suboptimal security posture.
Fonts are also much more complex than basic images. They’re essentially programs in their own right. Which, again, complexity, security, hard. Also, if you turn off javascript philosophically because you don’t like other people running code on your computer, fonts are in the same bucket.
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Thank you for linking this–I’ve joined. Magit is something I always point to as a killer feature of Emacs. It is professional level software being distributed perfectly free–and that is worth supporting.
This is really enjoyable and interesting! Subscribed. Thanks for all the curating work, pek!
Thank you! I’m glad you enjoy it :)