Weekly Thing #102 / Apr 20, 2019
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Weekly Thing
Join over 1,000 subscribers to the Weekly Thing by Jamie Thingelstad! Each Saturday morning, you will get my thoughts on technology, leadership, productivity, culture, privacy, and anything else interesting. I add commentary combining my decades of experience leading teams and building technology. I also include my personal writing, what I’m currently into, and a photograph of the week. There is even a fortune at the end! 🥠 A friend once described the Weekly Thing as a “direct feed from Jamie’s brain.” 🧠 There are no ads, your email will never be shared, your privacy will be protected, and it is free. Subscribe now and positively impact your journey with knowledge, insight, and perspective! Here is what others have to say. 🙌 “I’m a better person and leader because of the Weekly Thing!” — Jenny “I look forward to reading what you are digging.” — David “I don’t find the interesting links you share anywhere else!” — Andy “It’s a perfect start to every Saturday!” — Phil
Weekly Newsletter from Jamie Thingelstad
Issue #102 / Apr 20, 2019
Happy Easter Weekend to all of you! I hope the Easter Bunny brings you something great in your basket. 🐰 And Happy Earth Day coming up on Monday! 🌎 I am so excited for this weekend. It’s one of those first weekends where all the snow is gone, and it looks like it’s going to be absolutely gorgeous! ☀️
Tomorrow I’m going to be putting together a new flat top grill, a birthday present that I left in the box until it was nice out and I could use it. I’m excited to give it a maiden run tomorrow. I also plan to get a good campfire going tomorrow night. 🔥 Time for some s’mores!
I hope you all have a great, relaxing and enjoyable holiday weekend! Now, let’s get to some fun links for the week. 👇
Featured Links 🏅
The nutrition study the $30B supplement industry doesn’t want you to see | Ars Technica (https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/04/the-nutrition-study-the-30b-supplement-industry-doesnt-want-you-to-see/) arstechnica.com
We seem to constantly learn that food is the ultimate analog. We try to decompose it into numbers and weights, chemicals and nutrients. But it’s fundamentally analog. It cannot be decomposed to bits and bytes. When we try to recompose it from units, it isn’t the same thing, and our bodies know.
When the researchers picked apart effects of individual micronutrients, they found that adequate intake of vitamin K and magnesium linked to a lower risk of all-cause mortality. Also, vitamin A, vitamin K, zinc, and copper were associated with a lower risk of death from cardiovascular disease. But these benefits were restricted to intake only from foods—not supplements.
As Michael Pollen stated so succinctly: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. (https://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/unhappy-meals/) .
Great developers are raised, not hired – The Principal Developer by Eduards Sizovs (https://sizovs.net/2019/04/10/the-best-developers-are-raised-not-hired/) sizovs.net
I agree with the premise of this article. Talent in technology is in high-demand, and growing technology organizations will never be able to fill all their positions by going to the market for existing talent. Teams have to learn how to hire motivated learners and develop them.
In the current market situation, every company needs to build a mentoring capacity. The most experienced developers should find time to grow less experienced colleagues through pair programming, continuous feedback, career advice.
All great technology organizations are learning organizations, and perhaps bringing in and developing future talent is the best example of that.
My Weekly Photo 📷
This United sign stands proudly in front of the just opened Allianz Field, the new Minnesota United home. Our family name is on there somewhere. ⚽️
This United sign stands proudly in front of the just opened Allianz Field, the new Minnesota United home. Our family name is on there somewhere. Apr 13, 2019 at 6:24 PM Allianz Field, 400 Snelling Ave N, Saint Paul, MN
Notable Links 📌
Selfie Deaths Are an Epidemic | Outside Online (https://www.outsideonline.com/2393419/selfie-deaths) www.outsideonline.com
Oh my.
Last October also witnessed the much-publicized deaths of travel bloggers Meenakshi Moorthy and Vishnu Viswanath, who apparently fell while taking a selfie at Yosemite’s Taft Point, a popular rock outcrop with an 800-foot drop. A month prior, Tomar Frankfurter, an 18-year-old from Jerusalem, also fell to his death in the park while reportedly taking a selfie at Nevada Fall. Last July, three stars of High on Life, a popular YouTube thrill-seeking adventure travel show, plummeted to their deaths at a waterfall near Squamish, British Columbia. And in late March, a man from Macau fell 1,000 feet to his death while attempting to take a selfie on the rim at Grand Canyon West.
Stay safe out there! 📷🧗♂️
Facebook is working on an AI voice assistant similar to Alexa, Google Assistant — Ars Technica (https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/04/facebook-is-working-on-an-ai-voice-assistant-similar-to-alexa-google-assistant/) arstechnica.com
You would have to be absolutely bonkers to put a microphone attached to Facebook in your house! Please no… just no.
CalZones Review – MacStories (https://www.macstories.net/reviews/calzones-review/) www.macstories.net
I need to deal with time zones frequently and most time zone apps on the App Store are garbage. This one is really well done, and has a very solid user experience.
Why software projects take longer than you think – a statistical model · Erik Bernhardsson (https://erikbern.com/2019/04/15/why-software-projects-take-longer-than-you-think-a-statistical-model.html) erikbern.com
This is like reading a mathematical breakdown of what I’ve seen over decades of building software. It also highlights why Agile processes focus on spiking the biggest unknowns before tackling other tasks. Those individual tasks can take all of the time.
Pete For America Design Toolkit (https://design.peteforamerica.com/) design.peteforamerica.com
This is great design, and a very well done toolkit to enable supporters to embrace your materials. Great example that other politicians, companies, and really any brand could emulate.
Opinion | What Women Know About the Internet - The New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/10/opinion/privacy-feminism.html) www.nytimes.com
There are definitely gender differences on privacy matters.
Even well-meaning efforts at transparency don’t always work that way for women. Lyft’s car pool service shares the registered names of passengers with everyone else in the car. The first name of an incoming passenger flashes in lights across the dashboard, a feature intended to let riders know they are in the right car. A privacy researcher told me that she once jumped into a Lyft shared ride wearing a sweatshirt with her company’s logo. The next day, she received an email from a male passenger saying, “I found you!” Clearly, he had been able to use her first name and the name of her company to track her down online.
This is a good example where more gender diversity in technology would help.
“Ethics” and Ethics - iA (https://ia.net/topics/ethics-and-ethics) ia.net
There is growing occurrence of Ethics functions in tech companies. Ethics Officers even. That is probably a gimmick, as this article suggests. This is a thoughtful analysis of what ethics can and could drive in technology companies.
Sourced Fact (https://sourcedfact.com/) sourcedfact.com
This is a cool way of showing journalism with the source material directly discoverable from the content. I spent some time thinking of a system that would do something sort of like this, a sort of open-source news. This is a well done realization of some of those ideas.
Opinion | It’s Time to Panic About Privacy - The New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/10/opinion/internet-data-privacy.html) www.nytimes.com
A visual explainer on privacy matters. Introduces the unknown “other” uses for some of the devices we are putting in our homes.
Uber’s IPO Is Historic, Despite Its $10 Billion Loss - The Atlantic (https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/04/ubers-ipo-historic-despite-its-10-billion-loss/586999/) www.theatlantic.com
What an amazing amount of money being invested.
Here’s a deeply strange thing about Uber, which publicly filed for its IPO today: The company has lost $10 billion from operations, just since 2016, and while riders have paid $79.4 billion for rides, many drivers attest that they can barely scrape together a living. So no part of the operation is a high-margin business, and yet Uber keeps growing and growing and growing.
If the end-game to real profit and margin for Uber is self-driving cars, one has to wonder if they can possibly lose that much money while those are being developed. I think it’s a long ways off.
Calory Review: Simple, Convenient Calorie Tracking – MacStories (https://www.macstories.net/reviews/calory-review-simple-convenient-calorie-tracking/) www.macstories.net
There are so many food tracking applications, and I’ve used a lot of them. I currently use Ate (https://youate.com) which is all about photo journaling. There are super precise calorie loggers, but this fun logger with a delightful user experience looks really good.
Daring Fireball: Disney+ Details: $7/Month, No Commercials, Tons of Old and New Content (https://daringfireball.net/2019/04/disney_plus) daringfireball.net
This offering has some definite potential. Disney has an amazing catalog of content, and I have a high degree of confidence they will execute this well.
3 pieces of advice in Jeff Bezos’ Shareholder Letter – On my Om (https://om.co/2019/04/17/3-pieces-of-advice-in-jeff-bezos-shareholder-letter/) om.co
Summary of some key highlights from Jeff Bezos Shareholder letter (https://blog.aboutamazon.com/company-news/2018-letter-to-shareholders) . I really like the “Wander” point. It is very uncomfortable to do that, but acknowledging that it is a necessary component to innovation is important.
Give Back 🎁
https://www.eff.org
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (https://www.eff.org) is the leading nonprofit organization defending civil liberties in the digital world. I have been a member of the EFF for years. Not only is the EFF working hard to protect you on the Internet they have also recently launched solutions like Privacy Badger (https://www.eff.org/privacybadger) and the critically important Let’s Encrypt (https://letsencrypt.org) service to make encrypting web servers free to anyone. Support the EFF with a donation (https://supporters.eff.org/donate) !
Yet More Links 🍞
- Tinder’s move to Kubernetes – Tinder Engineering – Medium (https://medium.com/@tinder.engineering/tinders-move-to-kubernetes-cda2a6372f44) medium.com Lessons learned moving a very big social platform to Kubernetes.
- An Intro to Threading in Python – Real Python (https://realpython.com/intro-to-python-threading/) realpython.com Great overview of threading for Python with good code examples.
- Apple revamping Find My Friends & Find My iPhone in unified app, developing Tile-like personal item tracking - 9to5Mac (https://9to5mac.com/2019/04/17/find-my-iphone-revamp/) 9to5mac.com Makes sense. Sounds like a clone of Tile (https://www.thetileapp.com/en-us/) .
- ‘Tim Cook: The Genius Who Took Apple to the Next Level’ Is an Insightful Look at the Values that Guide the Company’s CEO – MacStories (https://www.macstories.net/reviews/tim-cook-the-genius-who-took-apple-to-the-next-level-is-an-insightful-look-at-the-values-that-guide-the-companys-ceo/) www.macstories.net Tim Cook impresses me greatly, this book might be a good read.
- Desmos | Graphing Calculator (https://www.desmos.com/calculator) www.desmos.com Very cool, fast, and easy to use graphing calculator in the browser. 🤓
- iOS 13: Dark Mode, detachable panels, Safari and Mail, more - 9to5Mac (https://9to5mac.com/2019/04/15/ios-13-features-dark-mode/) 9to5mac.com Bunch of leaks of possible new features in iOS 13. 😎
- EdgeDB — The next generation database (https://edgedb.com/) edgedb.com Interesting new hybrid database.
- Link Click Analytics and Privacy | WebKit (https://webkit.org/blog/8821/link-click-analytics-and-privacy/) webkit.org Glad to see WebKit continuing to make privacy a core feature.
Microposts 🎈
Wednesday @ 10:00 PM (https://micro.thingelstad.com/2019/04/17/the-minnesota-aspirations.html)
The 2019 Minnesota Aspirations in Computing Awards (https://mnstateitcoe.org/announcing-the-2019-minnesota-aspirations-for-women-in-computing-awards-honorees/) Honorees tonight were very impressive! Congratulations to all of you! 🎉 #TeamSPS was there to celebrate and welcome the four interns joining SPS Commerce this summer. #MNAiC2019
Wednesday @ 7:25 PM (https://micro.thingelstad.com/2019/04/17/fun-and-inspiring.html)
Fun and inspiring keynote at Minnesota Aspirations in Computing Awards (https://mnstateitcoe.org/announcing-the-2019-minnesota-aspirations-for-women-in-computing-awards-honorees/) from Amy Alexander (https://www.linkedin.com/in/amy-e-alexander/) , Senior Biomedical Engineer at Mayo Clinic, sharing some of the incredible work she does to help patients. #MNAiC2019
Wednesday @ 7:00 PM (https://micro.thingelstad.com/2019/04/17/excited-to-be.html)
Excited to be at the 2019 Minnesota Aspirations in Computing Awards (https://mnstateitcoe.org/announcing-the-2019-minnesota-aspirations-for-women-in-computing-awards-honorees/) honoring amazing young women starting careers in technology! Very happy that #TeamSPS can be part of it!
Monday @ 10:52 PM (https://micro.thingelstad.com/2019/04/15/just-ordered-my.html)
Just ordered my MacStories 10th Anniversary T-Shirt (https://www.macstories.net/news/announcing-the-macstories-10th-anniversary-t-shirt-and-pin/) ! 👕
Saturday @ 9:33 PM (https://micro.thingelstad.com/2019/04/13/that-puts-a.html)
“That puts a capper in what‘s been a completely nominal day here at Space X!” 🤓 That is engineering speak for awesome!
Saturday @ 9:29 PM (https://micro.thingelstad.com/2019/04/13/got-to-watch.html)
Got to watch the Space X Arabsat-6A (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXMGu2d8c8g) launch from two days ago. Still amazes me watching the booster rockets land. 🚀😲
Saturday @ 8:00 PM (https://micro.thingelstad.com/2019/04/13/sad-to-hear.html)
Sad to hear that Creative Kidstuff (http://www.creativekidstuff.com/store/ck/site) is going out of business. That was always one of our favorite local stores. ☹️
Saturday @ 7:32 PM (https://micro.thingelstad.com/2019/04/13/allianz-field-satellite.html)
Allianz Field satellite view needs an update! 😊
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Saturday @ 7:26 PM (https://micro.thingelstad.com/2019/04/13/hard-fought-mnufc.html)
Hard fought #MNUFC match against NYCFC. Ended in a 3-3 draw. Fabulous experience at Allianz Field for home opener!
Saturday @ 5:51 PM (https://micro.thingelstad.com/2019/04/13/want-to-hear.html)
Want. To. Hear. Wonderwall. ⚽️ C’mon United! #MNUFC 3-3
Saturday @ 5:39 PM (https://micro.thingelstad.com/2019/04/13/var-serves-justice.html)
VAR serves justice for #MNUFC! ⚽️ 3-2 still.
Saturday @ 5:27 PM (https://micro.thingelstad.com/2019/04/13/they-water-the.html)
They water the grass at halftime at Allianz Field. 💦⚽️
Saturday @ 5:25 PM (https://micro.thingelstad.com/2019/04/13/family-selfie-from.html)
Family selfie from #MNUFC historic home opener in Allianz Field! 3-2 at halftime. ⚽️🙌😎
Saturday @ 4:21 PM (https://micro.thingelstad.com/2019/04/13/so-excited-to.html)
So excited to be here, right now, for the Minnesota United home opener in the gorgeous Allianz Field! ⚽️🖤🙌
Saturday @ 7:38 AM (https://micro.thingelstad.com/2019/04/13/coffee-cathedral-ratio.html)
Coffee Cathedral. Ratio (https://ratiocoffee.com) Eight making magic with beans from Sump Coffee (https://www.sumpcoffee.com) . ☕️
Friday @ 5:45 PM (https://micro.thingelstad.com/2019/04/12/we-had-a.html)
We had a family debate that Nutella (https://www.nutella.com/en/us) from Europe wasn’t as sweet as what we get in the United States. I brought a jar of Nutella back and we did a blind taste test. Nobody could tell the difference, they tasted identical. 👍
Friday @ 5:16 PM (https://micro.thingelstad.com/2019/04/12/also-watched-arctic.html)
Also watched Arctic (https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/arctic_2019/) on flight. Liked it a lot. Almost no dialogue, but that doesn’t take anything away. 🥶🎬✈️
Friday @ 4:35 PM (https://micro.thingelstad.com/2019/04/12/i-love-the.html)
I love the messages the kids leave for me on the chalkboard when I come home from trips! ❤️
Friday @ 11:51 AM (https://micro.thingelstad.com/2019/04/12/watched-green-book.html)
Watched Green Book (https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/green_book) and thoroughly enjoyed it. Great movie and equally great acting. 🎬✈️
Fortune 🥠
You’ve made it all the way to the end! 👏 Here is your fortune for this week.
You will be recognized and honored as a community leader.
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