Peeling bananas.
I used to open them from the hard stem bit which was not always successful, but it turns out that if you pinch them at the other end, they open up much easier:
880 karma · joined October 26, 2010
I used to open them from the hard stem bit which was not always successful, but it turns out that if you pinch them at the other end, they open up much easier:
Let them treat employees like cannon fodder. Some of those employees might end up creating something new and innovative, rather than building another product that gets eventually dead-pooled by Google, or copy-pasted by Meta.
Someone's earlier point about hiring as a growth indicator to VC's reminds me of the point made by the CEO in the documentary about how VCs told him he needed to have 100 employees in order to boost the value of the company, so they ended up hiring people off the street, spouses and family members.
Crazy story.
I work in a large organisation where some of the issues mentioned are very relevant, especially the 'flow state" issue.
We have a mix of on-site and remote workers (myself being a remote worker), and because Slack/Teams is our primary method of communication with colleagues, and I operate in a tech lead role, it becomes difficult to achieve flow state on some tasks.
I ended up creating an Apple shortcut that automatically setup the computer for operating in a flow state (called Superbam - https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/5c0c729476584e11b3b12744893...). It helped to some extent.
I think a lot of organisations are clueless about flow state and why they should give developers the chance to reach it.
My neighbour had dropped her phone in some water, it was a Samsung S21, and the screen was messed up. The moment you tried to activate the screen, lines would appear across it. It was unusable.
Thankfully she had a spare phone available to use, but she needed to get a bunch of things setup on there (Google Mail, NHS for the Covid pass as she was travelling abroad).
She ran into an issue authenticating her Google Mail account - the password. She didn't remember it, so we tried the "Forgot Password" user flow.
For reasons unknown, the user flow insisted on sending a notification to her Samsung S21, even though we had swapped the SIM card from that phone into the new phone, and we had no way to swipe the notification on the S21 due to the screen being broke.
Somehow, we managed to trigger sending a text message with a code, and thankfully she got access to her Gmail account and other items.
But it was not a simple process, and there's no way your everyday person would have a clue how to deal with such cases (it confounded me and I'm a developer!), so I hope that someone with UX and QA chops is able to cater for scenarios like someone's phone screen being busted and knows how to provide alternative options that your everyday folk can get to grips with.
One example was having code where the test suite ran fine on my local MacBook, but would fail on CI (Linux). It turned out that on Linux finding files by name is case sensitive, whereas on Mac OS it isn't, and a require statement in Node.js was referencing a file path with casing that was different to the file name's spelling.
I loved how it explained the counter-intuitively of rising crime whilst drug busts put dope on the table, or the risks of an aggressive or non-compliant fishing policy being the EU, or the tale of a group selling their model to a hedge fund for a small fortune.
So many potential ways to use this, and unfortunately I never encountered it at workplaces in my career. I think that’s when you realise that sometimes the ideas have to be presented by yourself.
New Bamboo got acquired by ThoughtBot some years ago.
Scraping the site on a regular basis and taking screenshots is the only way to stop them from scrubbing the reviews.
e.g.
class Admin extends Model {
};
export default Admin;It sounds daft, but I used to repeat a phrase in my head when flying: "safe, calm, happy". It's more of a psychological trick than anything else, but I found it helped me to adjust my thinking at moments.
Recently, I took a role which meant working abroad, and then I realised that I would need to be doing quite a lot of flying to get back for various events. In July I've flown 9 times, 2 of which were on a propeller plane (Bombardier Q400). The experience of doing that many flights means that I don't experience any anxiety when flying, but I still tend to strap myself in a bit more tightly whenever there's some turbulence.
Oh, and the other thing that helps is sitting next in the window seat - being able to look out the window when the plane is taking off, in flight and landing helps. You also get to see some great views.
It's a good watch. RIP Stanislav Petrov.
The company where I work (Starcount) is looking for people to work in data engineering (Hadoop and Spark), frontend (React), backend (Node) and Salesforce admin. If anyone is interested, my email is paul.jensen@starcount.com, and I'm @paulbjensen on Twitter.
- There will be a people drain from Yahoo. Anyone was is passionate about Yahoo will feel completely disenfranchised with being merged into a smaller competitor that is owned by a larger company. Some people will hold out for being made redundant in the hope of a good severance package, and some will simply stay regardless, but those who see what is happening will realise that Yahoo is over, and won't want to be a part of the frankenstein being assembled within Verizon.
- Yahoo's main properties (Homepage, Weather, Finance, Mail) will survive, Flickr/Tumblr I don't know. Tumblr itself has suffered from the difficulties of merging into Yahoo's culture and way of doing things. Flickr was resurrected in some ways, but struggles from the difficulties that other web 2.0 brands have - how to stay relevant and interesting to consumers today when the industry has changed so much since their creation.
- Mayer will go. She tried and she didn't succeed. She'll get a decent severance package, but Tim Armstrong will finally get what he's wanted for a long time. Whether he's able to successfully merge two large-sized businesses together I don't know, this is a different challenge compared to acquiring businesses like Goviral or Millenial Media, we're talking about a headcount of ~8000 employees, and there will be lots of duplicate roles. I don't expect the merger to go smoothly - I expect it to be a bit messy.
Either way, the goal of creating a relatively strong #3 to Google and Facebook seems at this point a lost cause - both Google and Facebook have market valuations that dwarf what AOL and Yahoo were worth at the time of their merger, and given a signal of what we might see in the next couple of years.
Paul
- Writing a book is a huge undertaking - make sure that you have the time to do it.
- Find a good environment to write the book in - if you have kids/pets/others that will interrupt you, try to find somewhere else to do the writing - Marcus Hammerberg (the co-author of Kanban in Action) wrote his in coffee shops, with the side effect that he gained 10lbs, so factor that in.
- Try to pause on blockers if you can - time spent on coding/writing does not always result in the equivalent amount of book being produced.
- Check what the tech landscape for your book's subject is like - if it's very fluid then plan around it - since I started my book, Node.js was forked to create IO.js, Node Webkit was renamed to NW.js, IO.js merged back into Node.js, and then Electron emerged on the scene and now overshadows NW.js (which is ironic given that they have something of a shared history).
- Keep your editor informed - I've had quite an eventful 18 months and it helps to let them know what's going on in your life.
- Writing a book is a great feeling when you see your name as a published author.
I think the one takeaway is that it is like doing a dissertation whilst also doing a job - ask yourself if you can commit to that. If you can, great. And find the right motivation too, because you are putting at least a year of your life into this project.
Would Mozilla ever want to exercise this clause? I don't know - I wonder how they would react if Verizon/AOL ends up buying them, given that Netscape was bought by them early on.