Rafał Malinowski

Great talk about TDD, creating clean code and why this is so important.

You must accept responsibility for unmotivated programmers who “only want to code” or who appear to be concerned only with flashy, new tech.

The only problem I have with this statement is that I believe that devs should really get better in creating code. Because without that after 3 months product development will slow down with each day.

His enthusiasm for changing the world is replaced with nit-picking the development process.

Worse of all, though, his concern that “We aren’t building the right thing” will be replaced with “We aren’t building the thing right.”
He’s learned to not give input on what is built, so he becomes obsessed with how it’s built.

Optimizing for promotion
My first denied promotion taught me the wrong lesson. I thought I could keep doing the same work but package it to look good for the promotion committee. I should have done the opposite: figure out what the promotion committee wants, and do that work exclusively.

I adopted a new strategy. Before starting any task, I asked myself whether it would help my case for promotion. If the answer was no, I didn’t do it.

My quality bar for code dropped from, “Will we be able to maintain this for the next 5 years?” to, “Can this last until I’m promoted?” I didn’t file or fix any bugs unless they risked my project’s launch. I wriggled out of all responsibilities for maintenance work. I stopped volunteering for campus recruiting events. I went from conducting one or two interviews per week to zero.

What if “success” was paying yourself $30,000 a year and traveling the world with your family?

What if “success” is building an amazing place to work where your team is paid really well and actually enjoys working there (instead of having people who jump from startup to startup playing the equity game)?

What if “success” wasn’t attached to team size but instead was attached to customer happiness?

HW: You told me the other day that every Sunday you write a letter to the entire engineering team. When did this start and what’s the motivation behind the practice?

SS: It actually started out as a personal accountability exercise – I think it’s very easy to fool yourself as a senior leader about your effectiveness, so I was trying (in Google snippet style) to just document my goals and accomplishments each week, in a transparent and accountable way

You'll notice that many of the laws above don't directly apply specifically to software, and this is intentional. The fact remains that software is built for people to use and interact with, so many of these laws relate to dealing with people rather than code.

But even in the midst of the Dyn attack, some of the Mirai-infected devices were being used to attack another target—the infrastructure of a gaming company, according to Allison Nixon, the director of security research at security company Flashpoint. That idea matches up with what others who had some insight into the attack have told Ars confidentially—that it was also pointed at Sony’s PlayStation Network, which uses Dyn as a name service provider.

8. Employers Don’t Honor Their Commitments. Integrity and honesty are two traits that every employee will expect of their managers. If you say you will do something – do it. Keeping your word and your commitments tells the employee everything they need to know about you and the type of person you are and if they can trust you.

"So in conclusion, here's my assessment of the Portrait mode blur processing:

It's good. Apple is doing it right. It's not a gaussian blur.
There's opportunity for improvement.
It's a miracle that a telephone can do all this processing as fast as the iPhone 7 Plus does."

Using data from a large national survey of older adults, in 2012 Dr. Perissinotto analyzed the relationship between self-reported loneliness and health outcomes in people older than 60. Of 1,604 participants in the study, 43 percent reported feelings of loneliness, and these individuals had significantly higher rates of declining mobility, difficulty in performing routine daily activities, and death during six years of follow-up. The association of loneliness with mortality remained significant even after adjusting for age, economic status, depression and other common health problems.

- Once we accept loneliness, we can get creative: we can start to send out messages in a bottle: we can sing, write poetry, produce books and blogs, activities stemming from the realisation that people around us won’t ever fully get us but that others – separated across time and space – might just.

Apple and Google both benefit from having apps be as cheap as possible. For Apple, that means people will buy an iPhone more readily when the cost to fill it with software is near nil. For Google, it means app makers have to shove ads into products to make them pay. Win-win-lose.

Essentially, by designing & fixing our environment we simply change the way we react to it. By looking at an abandoned house with lots of broken windows, I wouldn’t feel too bad to smash another window with a stone just for fun.

Gloria Mark, professor in the department of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, says that when people are interrupted, it typically takes 23 minutes and 15 seconds to return to their work, and most people will do two intervening tasks before going back to their original project. This switching leads to a build up of stress, she says, and so little wonder people who have high rates of neuroticism, impulsivity, and are susceptible to stress tend to switch tasks more than others.

Problem polega tylko na tym, że na tego rodzaju przypadłości nie zadziała żadna tabletka. Bez gruntownej rewizji tych kulturowych klisz (a wymieniłem zaledwie ich ułamek), bez prześwietlenia i rozbicia tego toksycznego mechanizmu, statystyki zapadalności na depresję – ową dojmującą, pełną cierpienia i bezsensu, ale jednak uzasadnioną reakcję na klimat współczesnej kultury – będą nadal rosnąć w geometrycznym tempie. Żeby temu zapobiec, trzeba wsłuchać się w komunikat, który próbuje przekazać nam depresja. Nie zagłuszać go ani idiotycznymi poradami w rodzaju „weź się w garść”, ani bezrefleksyjną nadzieją pokładaną w chemii, która, choć czasami konieczna, może skutecznie pozbawić nas szansy na rewolucję w imię zepchniętej na margines i próbującej przypomnieć o sobie bolesnymi symptomami psychiki.

It is like planning and throwing a full-on DIY wedding. There is so much invisible administrative and operational work that needs to be done to make any event happen. You know all those drinks and shirts and stuff on tables. Yea, human people carried those from a store to a car to the venue. Again and again and again. They probably fucked up their shoulder or back doing it. (Or maybe that’s just me.)

You are a worthy human being. Please don’t forget this. It’s easy to fall into the hole of self-loathing and despising the disabilities you are facing. No matter what will happen. You are a worthy human being and you deserve a good life. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

“There’s a mountain of data that we have at our disposal,” says Todd Yellin, Netflix’s VP of product innovation. Netflix has a well-earned reputation for using the information it gleans about its customers to drive everything from the look of the service to the shows in which it invests. “That mountain is composed of two things. Garbage is 99 percent of that mountain. Gold is one percent… . Geography, age, and gender? We put that in the garbage heap. Where you live is not that important.”

My thoughts about ad industry is exactly this.

The truth is that we’re selling software that lets companies, most of them small businesses like pool installers and flower shops, sell more stuff. The world of online marketing, where HubSpot operates, though, has a reputation for being kind of grubby. Our customers include people who make a living bombarding people with email offers, or gaming Google’s
googl
search algorithm, or figuring out which kind of misleading subject line is most likely to trick someone into opening a message. Online marketing is not quite as sleazy as Internet porn, but it’s not much better either.

I’m still not fully certain why I got the axe; it was never made explicit to me. I asked other managers and those on the highest level of leadership, and everyone seemed be as confused as I was.

My best guess is that it’s Tall Poppy Syndrome, a phrase I was unfamiliar with until an Aussie told me about it. (Everything worthwhile in life I’ve learned from an Australian, basically.) The tallest poppy gets cut first.

With that, I don’t mean that I’m particularly talented or anything like that; I mean that I was the most obvious advocate internally for certain viewpoints, given how I’ve talked externally about how the old GitHub worked. In Japanese the phrase apparently translates to The tallest nail gets the hammer, which I think works better for this particular situation, heh. I had on occasion mentioned internally my misgivings about the lack of movement happening on any product development, and additionally the increasing unhappiness of many employees due to some internal policy changes and company growth.

They believe in your company’s mission.
It’s cliché, I know, but it turns out it’s even true for developers.

And really, it’s one of the basic truths of life — we all want to follow some sort of mission that gives meaning to what we do.

Otherwise, you’re just a code monkey.

Artificial urgency for milestones loses its potency quickly — over the course of a job, and over the course of a career. For experienced software engineers and designers (the folks you most need wisdom from), it comes off as amateur and doesn’t inspire long term loyalty.

The criminal group was able to steal a total value of about $81 Million from the Federal Reserve's Bangladesh account through a series of fraudulent transactions, but a typo in some transaction prevented a further $850 Million Heist.

As a young designer I always wanted to work for brands like Coca Cola, I thought they are cool. And the moment I worked for them, the magic was gone. I actually never really wanted to work for Coca Cola because I believed in the work, but simply because I thought it looked good on my CV.

Just a couple of days in on the job, people suddenly wanted to talk to me about sickness, their personal problems, vacation days, being stuck in their jobs, etc. A lot of these problems could be met with a healthy dose of common sense, but the stories I sometimes heard really stuck with me. I was really unprepared for any of these stories. I started to make the problems my own and instead of taking proper distance, I let my empathy get the upper hand. Being the person that I am, I started to process these problems unconsciencely during my sleep and dreamed about them. This even led to a mild form of sleep deprivation at which point I had to actively take distance. Although I really felt like helping people with their problems, I couldn’t be the superhero they needed. All I could be was a listening ear and perhaps make it a little easier for them to be a part of the team. This was a harsh lesson for me though.

We need to go back to the origin to find out the essence of Agile. In 2001, 17 software gurus brought up the Agile Manifesto, which itself doesn’t prescribe what to do:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

So, early on at Intercom we identified deployment time as a really great way of shortening the feedback loop and keeping it short – which means we can build the right features for our customers in the fastest time possible.

Five years ago, rooms of people excitedly talking about their own contribution to a serious outage would have been a prelude to mass firings, rather than a path to profound learning.

I hate to tell you this, but right now the startup world, or at least the ones making the majority of the noise, have their heads up their own ass and don’t realize it stinks. They’re solving problems for the top 5% of the population. How can I get poor people to do my chores? How can I get people to drive me around without having to pay them health insurance? How can a drone deliver my toilet paper within 15 minutes while the person who fulfilled my order sits at her desk crying because she’s working a 15-hour day and can’t take time off to get that lump in her chest looked at. This is known as the service economy. Where entitled white boys figure out how to replicate their private school dorm experience for life.