32 / Individuals matter

Hey, hope you're doing okay ✌🏻

Tweet of the Week

Families don't typically fire their members. Families don't interview for new members. Families don't have promotions, KPIs and OKRs. Your company is not "just one big family." Implying otherwise is deceitful and manipulative. This is ultimately a professional context. — @KittyGiraudel

Favourites

• Individuals matter (danluu.com)

  Dan Luu about the non-fungibility (ugh) of people in an organisation and why companies are not Sim City.

• 10 years of... whatever this has been (apenwarr.ca)

  apenwarr revisits a ten-year-old article where they predicted the development of blockchain technologies. Thanks, Jan

• Scan of the Month (scanofthemonth.com)

  If you ever wanted to know what a CT scan of a Lego figure looks like, check this out.

Culture

• A Framework for Good Work Sample Tests: Eight Rules for Fair Tests (jacobian.org)

  Jacob Kaplan-Moss continues the series on work sample tests and has collected eight rules that make them good and useful.

• How to Influence Attitudes on your Team for Better Results (biodigitaljazz.tech)

  Tim Reynolds explains how the attitude of a single person can impact a teams performance and motivation.

• Stop requiring specific technology experience for senior-plus engineers (mikemcquaid.com)

  Mike McQuaid argues there should be less focus on the expertise on a specific technology when hiring senior(-plus) engineers.

• Compensation, rationality and the project/person fit (yosefk.com)

  Yossi Kreinin about fair compensation and why sometimes people quit even if they're worse off afterwards.

Software Engineering

• Why Emacs: Redux (batsov.com)

  Bozhidar Batsov explains their reasons to use Emacs in 2021.

• How I helped build a profitable MVP over a weekend (mzrn.sh)

  Giorgi Mez tells the story of building an MVP in a weekend and how B2B applications often don't need polish.

• Backdooring Rust crates for fun and profit (kerkour.com)

  Sylvain Kerkour does a threat analysis of the Rust crates system.

• One of these JPEGs is not like the other (blog.benjojo.co.uk)

  Ben Cox about the joys of JPEG decoding in software and hardware.

Cutting Room Floor

• Why staring at screens is making your eyeballs elongate – and how to stop it (theguardian.com)

  Adam Popescu about myopia and how it's often caused by long screen-time. If you don't read this, at least consider the 20-20-20 model: “Every 20 minutes, look at a distance 20 feet away, for 20 seconds”.

• Hacking Ham Radio for Texting (spectrum.ieee.org)

  Dale Thomas built a texting interface for VHF handheld radios.

• Notes on Web3 (society.robinsloan.com)

  Robin Sloan has some notes that explain why some people like Web3. Thanks, Jan

• Porting Doom to an nRF52840-based USB Bluetooth-LE Dongle (next-hack.com)

  next-hack has a detailed story of how they ported Doom to a USB-Dongle. Make sure to watch he video at the end! Thanks, Eric

• @that_mc on Twitter (twitter.com)

  Mack is a bus operator and rates the bus scene of the movie Shang-Chi in a hilarious way.

• How I'm able to take notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim (castel.dev)

  Gilles Castel shares the Vim setup that allows them to keep up with the lecture while writing latex equations.

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