what i'm reading: June 14

Put a custom URL on this blog, that’s something.

Continuing to read a combination of political and tech industry news, as protests continue but are deemed no longer newsworthy, and COVID is on the rise again as communities go back to pretending everything is normal. Welcome to the new normal.

Racial Justice

• R. Eric Thomas’s essay When All Of This Is Over: On The Narrative Of Protest And Progress reflects on the question: will this current movement result in actions to end white supremacy, or will we just go back to “normal”?

• This Abolitionist Reforms Chart from Critical Resistance helped me frame why some suggested police reforms don’t actually lead to meaningful change.

• Kurt Kemple’s Plea for Action suggests steps that tech companies must take if they truly mean the statements in their corporate “Black Lives Matter” posts.

• Captain Awkward points out that arguing with your racist white family members on Facebook maybe isn’t the best use of your time and provides tangible actions to consider instead.

• Annie D’Souza writes how to find your place in the social change ecosystem and points out some of the useful roles in a social movement that don’t involve going to protests.

• From The Midwestival I discovered the Building Movement Project, and Deepa Iyer’s post Beyond Hashtags and Slogans: When Solidarity Becomes Transformative. Need to read more from this site.

• Barack Obama suggests making this moment the turning point for real change will require both protest and political action. A bit of a moderate statement, but well-worded.

• Michelle Weber collects a long list of resources for white people who are not on Twitter 24 hours a day, which is a great list and a great title.

Engineering management

• Rachel Hands points out in her post on anti-racist management practices that leaders have a responsibility to do more than just be not-racist, and points to some good resources for managers looking to do better at creating an inclusive work environment.

• Ben French has three lessons for building teams that can adapt to change, which is a little focused on government/policy initiatives but could work for tech teams too

Effective engineering

• Aleksandra Sikora in the spicily-named Most tech content is bullshit points out why we shouldn’t blindly copy-paste solutions we find on the internet.

• Toby W has tips on drawing good architecture diagrams, which mostly comes down to “keep it simple”

• Julia Evans describes her process for writing questions to help people decide what to learn and what she learned from the process.

• Matt Belcher lists signs your software is rotting and some tools to address software rot.

• Phil Sturgeon’s long list of the benefits and pitfalls of different techniques to automate writing OpenAPI specs is one of many articles on APIs you won’t hate, which seems to be a useful resource for anyone who writes APIs

Big ideas in tech

• Greg Epstein, TechCrunch’s Ethicist in Residence interviewed author Ijeoma Oluo about ethics in tech, which left me wanting to know more about how tech and the internet are designed and used in non-Western regions.

• Jesse Li’s long essay Where Did Software Go Wrong? meditates on how software cannot be separated from human voices and systems, but stops short of suggesting answers.

• I love the phrase omnia contexta sunt from John D Cooks' post on having reminders that the world is complex. The aphorism, proposed by Latin scholar Lily Hart, literally means “all things have been braided”, thus suggesting not only complexity, but interdependence.

Coding tools

• Interesting to see projects like OSS Review Toolkit trying to automate cross-language FOSS license compliance checks and security advisories (project currently incomplete)

• New edition of Thoughtworks Technology Radar includes a lot of Kubernetes, ethical bias testing, and a sudden uptick in remote work tooling.

• Techradar seems to be an annoying site that tries to embed as many links to their other articles as actual content, this summary of findings from RiskSense’s new report “The Dark Reality of Open Source” at least doesn’t require your email to see it, unlike the report itself

• This Venturebeat summary of the paper Unsupervised Translation of Programming Languages contains some credulous quotes about how AI will allow non-technical users to write expert code, but it does contain the bare bones of how Facebook’s transcompiler was trained using unsupervised machine learning and gets decent results.