what i'm reading: October 18

I spent all of yesterday defrosting my fridge instead of writing a blog post, but on my list of things to do both of those things count as accomplishments. I’m making a tiny bit of progress on my backlog of half-completed ideas.

I’ve been following along with the protests in Nigeria via Twitter, but don’t have any good links to share about it except the #EndSARS hashtag.

Articles

Frameworks

• Nikhyl Singhal provides a framework to categorize what growth stage a company is in and deciding which stages fit your current career ambitions, as a way to make better choices when searching for a new role.

• John Cutler outlines a framework for getting people to ask better questions in a workshop, which seems useful reading for facilitation.

• I signed up for Stephen P. Anderson’s Mighty Minds Club, but honestly there’s so much content I often don’t have time to absorb it. I’m very glad I took the time for Anderson’s transcript of his Hopeful and Powerless? Design in a Crisis keynote though—there’s a lot of tangents and frameworks and things to think about, but the overall message is answering the question “how do I do work in today’s world?”

Commentary on tech news

• Kat Maddox is consistently hilarious on Twitter, and that follows through into her newsletter, the most recent of which caught my attention by introducing me to an open-source project that lets you kill kubernetes pods by shooting them in Doom.

• I saw some of Emily Kager’s satirical TikToks before reading her post about going viral as a woman in tech, and almost didn’t read it because I knew what to expect. There was a surprisingly positive twist to the story though!

• Felienne has a great rant about why blaming Excel or its users for data problems is pointless, which became relevant again with the recent spreadsheet error that misplaced Covid-19 testing data in the UK.

Technical rabbit holes

• The topic of “why did MySQL ever get so popular” has come across my radar multiple ways in the past few weeks. For me it was the only database I was really introduced to and thus the only one I knew, but posts like Gabriel Maia’s deep dive into why MySQL’s TIME type can only handle intervals of slightly less than 35 days really make me wonder…why is MySQL so popular?

• Eugene Wei analyses why TikTok’s design is particularly tailored to feed the algorithm information about what you want to watch, which I found interesting, especially since I have never used TikTok and am unfamiliar with its UX.

• Mike Hoye dives deep into the history of why zero-indexed arrays were invented, and along the way dunks on programmers' attachment to folk tales and the difficulty of accessing historical sources.

• I was fascinated by Rhodri Leng’s analysis of the phantom reference, a fictional paper from a style guide that has accidentally been cited by non-fictional works nearly 500 times.

Developer learning

• Nicolas Carlo has a neat summary of The Legacy Code Programmer’s Toolbox by Jonathan Roccara which covers at a high level a bunch of techniques for learning how to work with legacy code. I love legacy code, so I enjoyed this post and am now interested in the book!

• Neil Kakkar has a long list of things he’s learned in the last year, which I’m a little envious of. I wish I took better notes when I first started as a developer!

Leadership

• Chris Schillinger writes about his idea of “Abstract Management Interfaces”, which seems to be a way of framing “separate results from techniques when judging performance” in a way that is satisfying to brains that are used of thinking in engineering terms.

• Mikio L. Braun muses about what Principal roles are and are not, nothing particularly groundbreaking but I like to read a lot of perspectives on how to succeed at this sort of role.

• Anna Shipman has an interesting post on why senior leaders should meet one-to-one with everyone on their new team if it’s fewer than 150 people. It’s an interesting take and has lots of practical tips about how to make it functional.

Better communication

• Stephanie Morillo provides a helpful list of information to include in your technical blog posts if you don’t want to annoy developers reading it in the future. I found myself emphatically agreeing with a few of these!

• Dvir Segal outlines what a good onboarding plan should look like which is relevant to me as someone who wants to improve onboarding!

• Tanya S has a presentation on using storytelling methods to make a compelling presentation, something I may not be very good at.

Philosophical thoughts on computing

• Shreya Shankar muses on Twitter about what constitutes a source of truth for a machine learning model when you can get different results every time you run the same code.

• Thea Flowers has a very interesting take on the downside of centralized source code hosting like GitHub, with a quick little history of version control, and some dreams of possible alternate futures.

• Sarah Lim defends dynamically-typed languages for their contributions to her preferred static types.

I couldn’t think of a common theme for these

• This article about how free time is the key to happiness is mostly a promo for Ashley Whillans' book on the topic, but it does contain some reasonable strategies for making the most of your time.

• Ronnie Flathers post on all the ways to store session tokens in Javascript and their security implications is exactly the type of content I wish I could have found when I was first starting to do professional Javascript development. He doesn’t go into other complications like cross-browser support or private browsing mode, and his recommended techniques have some pretty serious drawbacks (a session that can’t survive a page refresh?!), but it’s neat to see a bunch of pros and cons laid out.