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I summarise all key actionable items to reduce time-to-understand by paraphrasing to:
- reduce length/verbosity/repetition
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reduce complexity/jargon
- without altering sentiment/plagiarising
- (inject my own opinions/comments, typically in nested parenthesised bullets)
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remove cruft/distractions (marketing, layout, fonts, …)
- (suppress my latent desire to add a relevant xkcd comic)
- draw attention to important things with emojis
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Correct Walking Posture
Fix knee, back, & breathing issues. delay lifting the back foot, making you peel it off the ground as if showing the person behind your soles ... Read More
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Management for Morale and Retention
Things managers should do. trust engineers don’t question every implementation detail allow engineers to drive some requirement... Read More
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LLM Use Cases
Some real-world “use cases” (half of which I disagree with). Retrieval/Search both inter- & intra-document (find doc in corpus & find i... Read More
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The Invention
The greatest invention (past, present, and future) is the Internet. humans are separated from animals by knowledge knowledge is prima... Read More
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Open Source is Illegal
We might be accidentally fighting on behalf of worst-offending profiteering companies. not all terms in (software) licences are legally bindin... Read More
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CRA & PLA Cybersecurity Laws Need Rewording
Proposed EU laws to restrict irresponsible businesses might be abused to hurt FOSS free & open-source software volunteers due to poor wording. the Cyb... Read More
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Open Source is Bad
For public safety, governments should incentivise warranties/support/maintenance for widely-used FOSS free & open-source software . FOSS licences ... Read More
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AI Stupidity
“Replacing your job” is not the biggest problem with current AI artificial intelligence . “prompt engineering” (carefully framing AI inputs to maximise qual... Read More
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Deno JS runtime advantages
New JavaScript runtime (deno) tries to fight the “worse-is-better law of software evolution”. simplifies software development by removing “accidental complexity”... Read More
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ChatGPT is a Toy
Current AI artificial intelligence bots are “A” but not “I”. output is fluent (grammar/syntax) but uninteresting (meaning) structure & st... Read More
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Aggressive Agile
“Agile” is a mindset, not a process/methodology. pragmatic-vs-purist-debate is invalid (because “agile” is a mindset) everyone has a different understanding... Read More
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Wine Quality
If you like it, drink it. constituents: supertasters (circa 25% of people) can consistently identify subtle flavours in wines preference: most (including ~90% of... Read More
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AI Bill of Rights
Principles to limit data misuse & automation from causing (unintentional) harm or infringing on civil rights. Safe & Effective Systems con... Read More
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Active Allies
Effective teamwork through knowledge rather than fear. understanding: curiosity about others’ viewpoints introspection: know thy own biases privilege: ackno... Read More
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Good Parenting
Don’t patronise your children. They lack experience, not intelligence. Read More
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Startup Sales Strategy
Product & sales strategy must co-evolve together. partition: have a clear (yes/no binary) definition of “target audience” scoring:... Read More
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Workflow vs Process
Workflows address tasks, processes address business goals. Workflow usually ordered sequence of steps to complete a task (“tactical”) each workflow... Read More
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Rule of Six
A line of code should do <6 things. human short-term & working memory can only cope with upto 6 pieces of info simultaneously # bad map(lambda x: x.split('=')[1], s.split(... Read More
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Maximise asynchronicity for remote productivity
Maximising flexible/asynchronous work is key to remote productivity. managers often give mixed messages, officially encouraging flexible hours witho... Read More
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Middle Management for Remote Work
Middle management ideas to make remote work a moral necessity rather than a culture-killer. remote work is successful for old trusted employees with defined rol... Read More
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Sustainable FOSS Management
Maintaining FOSS free & open-source software projects without burning out; and contributing successfully. goals maintaina... Read More
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Product Walk-throughs
Address what makes the product better than alternatives. don’t waste time on mundane (non- USP unique selling proposition/point ) features don’... Read More
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Documenting Software Architecture
What & How: practical, pragmatic approach to documenting architecture. Intro & Goals motivation/business problems solved, e.g. tabulated use ... Read More
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Dashboards Prove Data Accessibility
A dashboard is not just an interface; but proof of data CRUD create, read, update, and delete & comparison. dashboards are not for a “C... Read More
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Programming Principles
Maintaining clean code & making realistic dev time estimates. KISS keep it simple, stupid especially subprograms: ... Read More
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Cloud Demigration
Migrating away from clouds back to on-premise could be cheaper & more performant. clouds argue that ML machine learning infrastruct... Read More
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Prototype Fast
Product management focused on rapid prototyping (somewhere between thinking aloud and making a polished product). Applicable to software, hardware, and even organ... Read More
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Introduce problems before solutions
A hammer seems pointless if you’ve never seen a nail. solutions seem pointless if the corresponding problem/purpose isn’t clear… even if the problem is encountered ... Read More
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Policing FOSS
Is it feasible to provide a warranty for FOSS free & open-source software like the Linux kernel and Python? the world’s servers rely on the Linux kernel... Read More
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Marketing to developers
How to target developers (where traditional advertising often fails) & a comparison of the ad channels/platforms. TL;DR for the TL;DR choose goal ... Read More
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Best dev practices from experience
Excellent content written in the worst possible way. The deliberately bad language is fun for a few sentences, but quickly becomes painfully obfuscating. Ironic for some... Read More
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VSCode is semi-FOSS
Interesting release/licensing strategy. vscode is public/MIT but released binaries are augmented with MS proprietary code, branding, telemetry etc. and non... Read More
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The Five Principles
4th generation family business running on “The Five Principles” of quality, responsibility, mutuality/stakeholderism, efficiency, freedom. “They may sound lik... Read More
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Clouds are outsourcing less
AWS Amazon Web Services , Azure Microsoft Azure , and GCP Google Cloud Platform are moving towards running their own data centres rather than outsourcing Read More
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8 Levels of Reproducibility
I’m happy being at “level 5 reproducibility” for most FOSS free & open-source software projects. What concerns me more is APIs are forever. -1: not reprod... Read More
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GitHub non-code rendering
GitHub renders more than just code. The following are supported: various image diff modes (side-by-side, swipe, blend) *.stl 3D models, incl. webGL acceleration &am... Read More
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Best practice API design
From AWS Amazon Web Services CTO. APIs are Forever: never delete or change an API application programming interface , otherwise you will break the busine... Read More
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Clouds are becoming more specialised
Both generalist competition and specialised products are increasing. entire companies can be built around task-specific cloud tech apps are increasingly lo... Read More
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GenesisCloud GPU instances
New cloud provider focused on low-cost GPUs. Missing an equivalent of auto-scaling groups (ASGs) though. regions: iceland or norway instances: focused on consumer GPUs... Read More
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Making errors helpful
Pay attention to error verbosity & handling; your future self will thank you for it. fail noisily and informatively mission-critical killed process not report... Read More
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Build for "real" developers
Putting the majority (but not all) of future maintainers & consumers first. build for “real” devs (99%: insurance, healthcare, retail, banking) rather than i... Read More
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Interviewing developers
Pretty sure this is a more complete, thought-out superset of ideas. no 15-hour task, no 5-min chat. Something in-between. assuming you have some closed source code, ... Read More
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Active Metadata
The article is bit abstract & unclear, but the lists seem to contain some info. What is “active” metadata? Improved context of metadat... Read More
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Sphinx versus Mkdocs
both sphinx & mkdocs are mature with nearly identical feature matrices, and we’re not considering any other options. However, primary intended use is diffe... Read More
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How not to make a second successful startup
Succeeded once; could not reproduce. success & experience does not guarantee a second success “[existing solutions] were […] not great, but just go... Read More
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Email breach via expiring domain takeover
Don’t let your domains expire, or don’t use them for email. someone took over an expiring domain to get a dev’s emails no 2FA two-factor authentication so cou... Read More
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Best practice communication & documentation
don’t forget the purpose keep in mind the users what do they already know? what problem do they want to solve? focus on how not what: “A common mistake […] is ... Read More
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Best practice unbiased & quick hiring
Confidence bias selects for candidates who are good at interviewing [and not necessarily coding]. Solutions: first call: serious applicants get 30-45 min pre-sc... Read More
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Hiring engineers
Get the whole company to engage in hiring, and care for your candidates. $2k employee referral bonus may be an order of magnitude too small consider internships ... Read More
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Agile needs good culture, not just good processes
Mental health, communication, openness, and a supportive culture are important. Agile fails if people fail to communicate “Individuals and interactions (i.e... Read More
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Five levels of remote work
Outcompeting office-based companies. Levels: no plan recreate office online real-time shared documents, spontaneous chats, default meeting length 15 min w. ... Read More
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Make remote work asynchronous
Tips to increase remote work productivity. Use: task boards office hours & scheduling tools shared documents slack plugins email plugins Read More
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Research versus Reality
Side note given that I grew up in Kenya: the premise of the article is wrong. nice quote about being “too much of a research [rather than practical/useful] model:” ... Read More