Makura no Soshi

On teams, agile methods, and remote work …

• How to Deal with Difficult People on Software Projects – Neil on Software
  48 personalities that cause software development projects to fail.
• Why companies are still designing open plan offices – Katharine Schwab, Fast Company
  First, you tear down the walls and dispense with the soulless cubicles. Then you put everyone at long tables, shoulder to shoulder, so that they can talk more easily.
• Why Enterprise Agile Teams Fail – Sam McAfee
  No, you’re not crazy for trying this.
• Asynchronous Communication: The Real Reason Remote Workers Are More Productive – Amir Salihefendic
  Study after study after study into remote work has made one thing clear: Remote workers are more productive than their office-bound counterparts. What’s not entirely clear is why.
• Software Sprawl, The Golden Path, and Scaling Teams With Agency – charity.wtf
  Recently you saw something terrifying that you cannot unsee: your company is using all the languages, all the environments, all the databases, all the build tools. Shit!!! Your ops team is in full revolt and you can’t really blame them.
• How to run a Futurespective | Liz Keogh, lunivore
  Futurespectives, like Retrospectives, look back at the past… from the future! I find them very useful when there isn’t much to retrospect on: at the start of a project or initiative.

On art, design, and craftmanship …

• New Berlin rapid transit route map – Pasha Omelekhin
  A transit map should be simple, comfortable, and nice-looking, designed with loving care and for people. It should attract tourists to the city and have reasons to make residents enjoy it. Berlin has received such a map.
• Map of the Literature II – Martin Vargic
  The Map of the Literature is a truly gargantuan visualization of the 5000 years of literary masters and their works, showing how the different literary genres sprouted, branched and eventually evolved to their modern state.
• Apple’s HQ, Ruskin, Gothic Architecture, and Agile – Ian Miell
  Once you start thinking about how building encourages or discourages a means of living compatible with a human, creative and dynamic life, then you start to see it everywhere.
• wenn die leute wissen, wie würste gemacht werden … – wirres.net
  mittlerweile habe ich sogar meine zweifel, ob es sowas wie talent überhaupt gibt und ob wir talent als das wahrnehmen, was eigentlich das ergebnis von enorm viel übung, oder genauer vom festbeissen und manische verfolgen einer sache, einer fähigkeit, eines ziels ist.
• Kind of Bloop: An 8-Bit Tribute to Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue – Andy Baio
  Kind of Bloop is a chiptune tribute to Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, a track-by-track 8-bit reinterpretation of the bestselling jazz album of all time.
• Peak Music – anmut und demut
  Ich schenk‘ mir dann mal einen Single Malt ein.

Misc dev advice …

• How is computer programming different today than 20 years ago? – Sedat Kapanoglu
  Here are some changes I have noticed over the last 20 years, in random order.
• Things I Believe About Software Engineering – Wesley Aptekar-Cassels
  How kind your teammates are has a larger impact on your effectiveness than the programming language you use.
• The Zen of Code Reviews: Review As If You Own the Code – Michael Sorens
  Whoever signs off on a code review agrees, essentially, that they would be able to support it in the future, should the original author of the code be unavailable to do it. Review code with the energy you’d use if you owned the code.
• Ten Platform Commandments – Charity Majors
  I talked about a bunch of the lessons learned by using and abusing and running and building platforms at scale.
• So you want to Onboard a DevOps Practitioner – Martin Jackson
  Bad environments (and broken cultures) do not attract nor retain top talent. In fact it does the opposite.
• Akin’s Laws of Spacecraft Design – Dave Akin
  These are some bits of wisdom that I have gleaned during that time, some by picking up on the experience of others, but mostly by screwing up myself.
• Empirical Evaluation Guidelines
  The programming languages research community often develops ideas whose worth is evaluated empirically.

On crypto and security …

• Cryptographic Right Answers – Latacora
  You should keep things simple and conventional and easy to analyze; ‘boring’, as the Google TLS people would say.
• The PGP Problem – Latacora
  Serious cryptographers have largely given up on PGP and don’t spend much time publishing on it anymore (with a notable exception). Well-understood problems in PGP have gone unaddressed for over a decade because of this.
• The New Illustrated TLS Connection – Michael Driscoll
  A revised edition in which we dissect the new manner of secure and authenticated data exchange, the TLS 1.3 cryptographic protocol.
• Curl to shell isn’t so bad – Martin Tournoij
  [It] is a very direct way to run code from the internet, whereas the other methods are running code from the internet, but with extra steps. It may ‘feel’ different, but in reality it’s just the same.
• Why Don’t People Use Formal Methods? – Hillel Wayne
  Verifying code is a hard problem. More and more people are doing it, though, as theorem provers and SMT solvers get more sophisticated. It will probably remain a specialist thing for the foreseeable future.
• Running servers (and services) well is not trivial – Chris Siebenmann
  These days, it’s often relatively easy to ‘just set up a server’ or a service, especially if you already work in the cloud. Spin up a VM or a Docker image, install some stuff, done, right? Well, not if you want this to be reliable infrastructure.

On too big to fail tech …

• How big tech is dragging us towards the next financial crash, Rana Foroohar, The Guardian
  Like the big banks, big tech uses its lobbying muscle to avoid regulation, and thinks it should play by different rules. And like the banks, it could be about to wreak financial havoc on us all.
• Absolute scale corrupts absolutely – apenwarr
  The Internet has gotten too big.
• Silicon Valley Techies Still Think They’re the Good Guys. They’re Not. | Erin Griffith, WIRED
  Will anyone ever write another positive story about a tech startup? I said probably not.
• How Evil Is Tech? – David Brooks, The New York Times
  Some now believe tech is like the tobacco industry — corporations that make billions of dollars peddling a destructive addiction.
• Nothing Fails Like Success – Jeffrey Zeldman, A List Apart
  Buying something you can’t afford, and borrowing from organizations that don’t have your (or your customers’) best interest at heart, is the business plan of most internet startups.
• How billions vanish into the black hole that is the security industry, Dimitri Tokmetzis and Maaike Goslinga, The Correspondent
  The [EU] Commission has been trying to boost the security industry for ten years now, and nearly €2 billion has already been funneled into security research.

some politics after non-Brexit day …

• The paranoid fantasy behind Brexit, Fintan O’Toole, The Guardian
  In the im­pe­ri­al ima­gi­na­ti­on, there are only two sta­tes: do­mi­nant and sub­mis­si­ve, co­lo­ni­s­er and co­lo­nis­ed. This dua­lism lin­gers. If Eng­land is not an im­pe­ri­al power, it must be the only other thing it can be: a co­l­ony.
• Why we stop­ped trus­ting eli­tes, Wil­liam Da­vies, The Guar­di­an
  The notion that public figures and professionals are basically trustworthy has been integral to the health of representative democracies. After all, the very core of liberal democracy is the idea that a small group of people – politicians – can represent millions of others.
• Die Politik ist bürgerverdrossen – Indiskretion Ehrensache
  Die Bür­ger­ge­sell­schaft wird als nicht zeit­ge­mäß emp­fun­den – al­lein Be­rufs­po­li­ti­ker ver­stün­den die Welt des Jah­res 2019 noch. […] Zu­sam­men­ge­fasst: Die Be­rufs­po­li­ti­ker möch­ten beim Weg­re­gie­ren nicht be­läs­tigt wer­den.
• Die haben das Internet nicht verstanden? Ich denke, doch.
  Meine These zur neuen Urheberrechtsgesetzgebung und deren Artikel 11 und 13 ist ja, dass die gesamte Novelle vor allem ein Versuch ist, das Internet so umzugestalten, dass es zu einem, – sagen wir mal – konservativerem Verständnis davon, wie Medien funktionieren, passt.
• Über Zugfahren in Europa
  Aber mit der Bahn über eine län­ge­re Stre­cke in ein an­de­res, eu­ro­päi­sches Land zu rei­sen, in eine Stadt ab­seits der paar Me­tro­po­len, die mit dem Rail­team er­reich­bar sind? Das kann ich nie­man­dem emp­feh­len, der nicht voll­kom­men schmerz­geil und mit einem di­cken Not­fall­geld­beu­tel ge­seg­net ist. An die­sem Punkt schä­me ich mich für “meine” Bahn, für “meine” EU.
• Für einen Neubeginn in Europa, Emmanuel Macron
  Noch nie seit dem Zweiten Weltkrieg war Europa so wichtig. Und doch war Europa noch nie in so großer Gefahr.

Über Arbeit und ihre Umstände …

• Homeoffice – Klischee und Realität | Das Nuf Advanced
  Wer sich für mehr Homeoffice einsetzen möchte, um Arbeitnehmerinnen und Arbeitnehmern eine bessere Vereinbarkeit von Beruf und Familie zu ermöglichen, könnte mehr als zwei Minuten in eine passende Bildwahl investieren.
• Vigilien.
  Ich erhebe die Forderung nach einer Architektur und Inneineinrichtung aus nicht mehr als 10 Materialien und nicht mehr als 5 Formen.
• Wework: Die Kaffeeautomatisierung des Lebens, Michael Seemann auf Golem.de
  WLAN, ein Tisch, frischer Latte Macchiato und schlaue Köpfe hinter Computern: Mit diesen Zutaten wollte die idealistische Coworking-Bewegung die Arbeitswelt revolutionieren. Herausgekommen ist die Plattformisierung vor allem in Gestalt von Wework – modular, effizient und pragmatisch.
• WeWTF, Scott Galloway
  It’s easy to wallpaper over the shortcomings of the business with a bull market’s halcyon: cheap capital. WeWork has brought new meaning to the word wallpaper.
• The Real Story of Automation Beginning with One Simple Chart, Scott Santens
  There’s a chart I came across in 2017, and not only does it tell an extremely important story about automation, but it also tells a story about the state of the automation discussion itself.
• How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation, Anne Helen Petersen on BuzzFeed
  I couldn’t figure out why small, straightforward tasks on my to-do list felt so impossible. The answer is both more complex and far simpler than I expected.

On Licenses, Open Source, Communities, etc

• Google: Sorry professor, old Beethoven recordings on YouTube are copyrighted | Ars Technica
  Op-ed: How one German professor had a bad experience with overly broad upload filters.
• You Think the Visual Studio Code binary you use is a Free Software? Think again. | Carl Chenet’s Blog
  Did you download your binary of Visual Studio Code directly from the official website? If so, you’re not using a Free Software and only Microsoft knows what was added to this binary. And you should think of the worst possible.
• The Realities of Being a FOSS Maintainer – Site Feedback – Caddy Community
  Author’s note: This is a more intimate look into what it’s like to be a maintainer of popular open source software. This is written by me, personally, and not as a representative of the company. I’m going out on a limb here, so try to be nice, okay?
• FOSS: passive consumerism kills our community | Carl Chenet’s Blog
  TL;DR: Don’t be a passive consumer of FOSS. It’s going to kill the FOSS community or change it in bad ways. Contribute in any way described in this article, even really basic ones, but contribute daily or on a very regular basis.
• Choosing to stay out of the community
  In the past couple of weeks, there’s been a lot of commotion in the open source / free software world about codes of conduct and specific people (Linus) and specific projects (Linux) and so on.
• FOSDEM annotated, at n-gate.com
  Let’s take a look at my annotated copy of the FOSDEM 2019 main talk schedule, shall we?