Makura no Soshi

On Gaming …

• The cost of games – Raph’s Website
  Lots of people have made the observation that in terms of raw purchasing power, players pay around half of what they used to in the 80s.
• Confessions of an Unreal Engine 4 Engineering Firefighter – Allar’s Blog
  Engineering is sometimes the most asinine and painful thing you can do, but those who love it understand the feeling of solving a problem and having something Just Work.
• The Existential Terror of Battle Royale – Jeff Atwood
  Battle Royale is not the game mode we wanted, it’s not the game mode we needed, it’s the game mode we all deserve. And the best part is, when we’re done playing, we can turn it off.
• How to survive in Fortnite if you’re old and slow | Keith Stuart, The Guardian
  If you’re thinking of dipping your toe in, here are 13 tips to get you started.
• Elite: Dangerous — A Comprehensive Beginner’s Guide
  Let’s be honest, Elite: Dangerous (ED) doesn’t exactly go out of its way to explain things to players.
• World of Warcraft perfectly predicted our coronavirus panic – Amit Katwala, WIRED UK
  An accidental pandemic in the online game offers a valuable insight into the way people are behaving during the coronavirus crisis.

On Covid-19 induced work from home conditions …

• Work in the Time of Corona – Alice Goldfuss
  As someone who has worked remotely for multiple companies, in different setups, I wanted to offer some assurances and tips for maintaining your mental health while adjusting to this new life.
• How To Work From Home | You’ve Been Haacked
  So now that you finally have the opportunity to work from home, don’t blow it! Working from home is a skill.
• Managing Remote Teams – A Crash Course – Andreas Klinger
  Remote work is the logical evolution of digital work. And the best-practices of remote teams are often learnings for all digital knowledge work teams.
• Creating predictability and stability in times of rapid change | Lara Hogan
  So let’s talk about what we can do for ourselves, and for those around us, to help address those core needs.
• Psychologische Sicherheit in unsicheren Zeiten – Michael May, Mayflower Blog
  Unternehmen haben gegenüber ihren Mitarbeitern eine Fürsorgepflicht, die in der Regel durch die Führungskräfte gelebt wird. Ich hoffe, deine Firma hat die nötigen Schritte eingeleitet und wartet nicht, bis die Einschläge noch näher kommen.
• Diese Form von Home Office ist: alles andere als normal! – Sabine Wojcieszak, getNext IT
  Die Situation, in der sich viele Unternehmen und auch viele unserer Kunden gerade befinden hat, wenig mit dem zu tun, was eigentlich unter verteiltem Arbeiten oder Home Office verstanden wird. Und es hat noch weniger mit New Work und der Motivation dahinter zu tun.

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.

Today I ended my Pocket Premium subscription.

I have been using Read It Later (now Pocket) since 2011, quite a long time ago. In 2015 I started paying for it because I used the service a lot, I found it very useful, and I did not want it to disappear like so many others have before. The best and notable features were:

• compact list view of bookmarks with tags
• good Firefox integration
• cross-device sync (e.g. offline reading on a tablet)
• usable API (e.g. to sync with Trello)

Read the rest of this entry »

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.