339 private links
A lightweight system for measuring engineering productivity that puts the overhead on managers, not engineers—using changelogs, standups, and visibility over surveillance.
Your product's core abstractions determine whether new features compound into a moat or just add to a feature list. Here's how to get it right.
Applying human ergonomics and design principles to syntax highlighting
Delicious slow cooker chicken gnocchi soup.
Useful in case someone you care about isn't willing to use Linux to avoid Microsoft's ongoing demise
GlitchTip shares how they used a feature of the built-in Angular localize tool to accomplish realtime localization without separate language builds.
If you follow the advice on these pages and the ones we’ve linked to, you’ll end up with an excellent set of slides, and you’ll be able to present them coherently, with confidence. You’ll make your point. The audience you’re presenting to will know exactly what you’re trying to say, or asking them to do.
How can I influence others without manipulating them? I explore five doors of influence: rationalising, asserting, negotiating, inspiring and bridging, to persuade with respect.
Many of the Sass features we've grown to love have made their way into native CSS in some shape or form. So, should we still use Sass? This is how developer Jeff Bridgforth is thinking about it.
"I am an AI hater. This is considered rude, but I do not care, because I am a hater."
Lovingly crafted vitriol - an principled argument from emotion against LLMs. Very effective reframe of this discussion.
High energy, vocal merengue version of Mozart's Rondo alla Turca, from my favorite music scene ever, Vulfpeck.
Decentralised, minimalist microblogging service for hackers. - buckket/twtxt
AI is not so much a tool that everyone uses in more or less the same way, but a mirror in which we see our own reflection--if we care to look.
Charles with an insightful take as usual.
The Model Context Protocol (MCP) promises to standardize AI-tool interactions as the “USB-C for AI.” While its simplicity accelerates adoption, MCP systematically overlooks four decades of hard-won lessons from distributed systems. This isn’t an academic concern: enterprises deploying MCP today are building on foundations that lack fundamental capabilities that every production remote-procedure calling (RPC) system, since 1982, has deemed essential.
Individual contributors can expect workplace psychological safety, but managers do not. This is not something that can be fixed, it's part of the role. Like how a plumber will sometimes have to smell sewage.
Reasons:
- Managers are more or less fungible.
- They compete against each other since contributors and other resources are limited.
- They are exposed to competitive pressures affecting the company.
- They are not fully informed about the the subjects for which they are responsible.
- Nobody will protect managers from these factors the way an IC is protected.
Managers can have a psychologically safe environment in a "peace through strength" fashion, or by being in the right place at the right time. But it is not permanent, and regression to the mean is just a growth cycle or reorg away.
Advice for first-time managers from someone who learned it the hard way, cleaned it up, and passed it on.
Insight: open source software from for-profit companies (e.g. Wordpress) can still be made obsolete (to force use of newer, enshittified versions) by making the software it depends on (e.g. PHP) adopt (unwanted, unnecessary) breaking changes.
Video-guided 1-2 hour exercise to get hands-on familiarity with Jujutsu version control, starting from nothing.