Recommended Articles - 2017/05/19

Got delayed so more and more news piled up... ending up with a not-so-small list of relevant articles (in my opinion at least!).

  • The Lazy Manifiesto (+ its principles): Sounds like a joke but it has really good points.
  • Deadlines and commitments... the fallacy: Deadlines are often are what I call "FUU": Fictitious, Unrealistic & Unilateral. I didn't knew about Theory X and Theory Y.
  • Incoming Redis streams, which comming from Salvatore smells like really good stuff. Interesting also for custom data format geeks: how the "Listpack" format will work (currently in draft)
  • Learn Redis the hard way (in production): Speaking of Redis... interesting tips
  • Electron is flash for the desktop: More or less my opinion. While interesting for some scenarios, in general it is worth to keep the browser doing its thing instead of having 3-4 "capped browsers" running web-apps.
  • SCUMM-8: Amazing use of the PICO-8 virtual console.
  • Scaling Unsplash with a small team: Nice advices:
    • Build boring, obvious solutions
    • Focus on solving user problems, not technology problems
    • Throw money at technical problems
  • @ethanschoonover: "Serverless" still feels to me like a restaurant saying they are "kitchenless" so they can focus on food instead of food preparation.
  • An Illustrated History of iOS: Half educative, half source of fun, it presents a nice summary of how iOS and the "iDevices" got from a beautiful but heavily limited phone to today's fully featured high end smartphone.
  • Machine Learning and Product Managers: Interesting resources to start reading about it. Also, if interested you should check Machine Box, a nice use of Docker to quickly and very easily have ML containers that tag images or recognice faces.
  • 35 programming habits that make your code smell: Some are very obvious, others interesting, in general a nice list.
  • 8 Lines of Code: Talk about hidden complexity and "code magic", about how going simple achieves better results and how often we make things harder by making them complex.
  • How to program independent games - CSUA Speech: Talk by Jonathan Blow, creator of Braid and The Witness, about doing things simple, how being clever causes more problems and focusing instead on solving the problem and even being empathic with other's solutions is good.
  • Hard-won lessons: Five years with Node.js: I don't do (nor fancy much) Node.js, but this advices look interesting and well thought, even more considering how the platform is still young and inmature.
  • How eBooks lost their shine: 'Kindles now look clunky and unhip': Interesting point of view, although as usual I'm out of the averages, as I love my Kindle and I'm actually shrinking my physical books collection (by gifting them to friends and family). Balance and freedom of format choice are the best scenario we can seek.
  • Bias driven development - Mario Fusco: Subjective parts are not of my liking (very opinionated speaker), but all the examples of biases are good ones, and I didn't knew about this two ones:
    • Bandwagon effect: "it worked for my friend" (or in general for others)
    • Law of triviality: aka bike shedding: speak discuss of trivial things at important meetings (like details of the bike shed discussing a nuclear plant).
  • Writing the CFP: Nice compilation of tips and advices to better prepare and give talks.
  • Anonymising images with Go and Machine Box: Small but helpful tutorial, mostly due to Machine Box being so easy to use. I personally have toyed with it (but with the photo tagging box) and is great (and free!).
  • A cybersecurity researcher halts ransomware attack: Was "funny" how in Spain some big companies were sending home all their employees and telling them to shutdown their computers, while this guy actually got to analyze the traffic (and source code?) and found how to stop or at least delay the spreading of the ransomware.
  • Why the "Google Docs" worm was so convincing: Previous malware was a reality check for people who thought patching and updating can wait, this one is indeed a harder one to spot.
  • Basecamp Employee Handbook: Great content and kudos to the transparency!
  • The art of destroying software - Greg Young: I loved this talk and the concept of simplification, detachment from code (what matters is the product, what adds value to the client), of doing small sprints after which you can throw away and rewrite the piece of code if didn't go well or you had to switch priorityes... Really enlightening
  • CQRS - Alistair Cockburn: 5 minutes talk in which you'll learn hexagonal architecture, CQRS, event sourcing... great how nicely explained it is for being so short.
  • Appleā€™s New Campus: An Exclusive Look Inside the Mothership: I don't fancy much the company but the building looks... WOW
  • How to Live on 24 Hours a Day: Really great advices:
    • "Time is money. [...] Time is a great deal more than money. If you have time, you can obtain money-usually. But you cannot buy yourself a minute more time."
    • "You cannot draw on the future. Impossible to get into debt! You can only waste the passing moment. You cannot waste tomorrow, it is kept from you."
    • "We shall never have more time. We have, and have always had, all the time there is."
    • "You can turn over a new leaf every hour if you choose."
    • "Beware of undertaking too much at the start. Be content with quite a little. Allow for accidents."
    • For starters, we can stop viewing our work as our lives and learn to distinguish the two or intertwine them.
Recommended Articles - 2017/05/19 published @ . Author: