Weekly Thing #178 / Reverse Meetings, OODA Loop, Hockey Goalies
I’m Jamie Thingelstad, and this is the Weekly Thing. You can read this, click on articles, all while knowing that your privacy is preserved and nobody is watching you. There are no tracking pixels or masked links here, and never will be!
We got back from our Arizona Escapade on Pi Day! Driving back over three days was much better than two. This week has been a bit of a blur, and I’m a day late getting this issue out so I’m going to keep it brief and get right on to the links! Have a great week y'all! 👍
"The last mile is always the least crowded." — Atomic Habits
Thick and sticky March snowfall on creek to Lake Pamela.
Mar 15, 2021
Pamela Park, Edina, MN
Recommended Links
The 5 Common Mistakes Of New Engineering Managers - Ochronus online
Good article for all engineering managers.
- Still doing much technical work
- Not giving (enough) holistic feedback
- Doing all the project management
- Not sharing enough information with the team
- Not doing one-on-one coaching
I would comment that the first item is often for very good reasons, because the manager wants to help the team hit the goal. However, it can also be a form of avoidance, doing something you are comfortable with and avoiding something else that you are more uncomfortable with.
Combating Zoom Overload with Reverse Meetings - Cal Newport
This reverse meeting concept is an interesting one. It could just be a different way o drive consensus that works well in any environment. I will say that the reduced friction of meetings in a Zoom-based world is noticeable. I was observing with someone the other day that I think meetings have gotten bigger, in part because you can add people to the meetings and you don't need to find a new meeting room. You don't hit capacity limits. And with meeting rooms being infinite, there is no limitation to quantity and size.
Introducing Amazon S3 Object Lambda – Use Your Code to Process Data as It Is Being Retrieved from S3 | AWS News Blog
Interesting new AWS capability to modify data as it is accessed in S3. These could be useful to keep data duplication down. It would seem critical that you make these Lamba methods as fast and dependency-free as possible.
The Fear of Putting Our Work Out There - zen habits
Good article that applies to any act of publishing or creating in public. I've been blogging for 20 years and still occasionally have some of those fears.
The OODA Loop: How Fighter Pilots Make Fast and Accurate Decisions
Good read and a mental model I had not heard of before.
The OODA Loop is a four-step process for making effective decisions in high-stakes situations. It involves collecting relevant information, recognizing potential biases, deciding, and acting, then repeating the process with new information.
Observe → Orient → Decide → Act ↩
I think the Orient step is the one that could easily be missed.
Orientation means connecting yourself with reality and seeing the world as it really is, as free as possible from the influence of cognitive biases and shortcuts.
🤔
Lost in Thought, By David Kortava | Harper's Magazine
Told through a very sad and unfortunate story of a woman that experienced a psychotic break during a meditation retreat. As the article states, casual meditation has not shown any potential to cause problems. But I do wonder if organizations that offer extended duration retreats should have some training to make sure that the mental state of people in those experiences is okay.
Hook – Find without searching
This macOS app kind of blows my mind. it allows you, in many applications but not all, to create hyperlinks to specific things or actions. It uses a ton of little scripts to connect into applications and get information to make links where they support them. It also has a "Hook to new…" feature that is pretty much worth the price alone. You can select an item in one app, and create a new thing in another app with a link back to the original. So you can select an email and Hook to a new task in OmniFocus that has the backlink already populated. Super handy!
OKAY | What Remote Work Really Does To Your Engineering Productivity
Good article with tips on managing remote engineering teams. It is notable that technology has enabled remote team functions in ways that were impossible before, but timezones still matter! Remote doesn't mean global, and I agree with the articles assessment that 3 hours is a tipping point. If day-to-day work slips between several timezones, the latency of feedback becomes impossible to deal with.
REST vs. GraphQL vs. gRPC · Dan Hacks
Super-simple overview of various ways to move data around. The highlight to me here is this is more about the right thing for the right job, not competitive. These solutions have different strengths.
The iconic watches that inspired Apple Watch faces
This article is probably just for watch geeks. It is a cool to see the design inspiration largely from mechanical watches of the past that have been brought forward to the digital watch faces on the Apple Watch. ⌚️
Moderation in Infrastructure – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
My view on this topic is very similar to Thompson's. I see end-user sites like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter as being completely within their realm to block and amplify whatever they want to do. They will make those decisions based on their revenue interests. When you move lower in the stack, and you are selling CPU cycles and network access, you should be less opinionated. Which probably also aligns with your revenue interests. Similar to what Thompson says here I find AWS's position the most challenging here.
Hockey Goalies Are Too Big Now - The Atlantic
I enjoy hockey and had been talking with a friend who had commented on the size of goalies, and that you need to be big to be a goalie in the NHL. I hadn't thought about it at all but it makes sense. This article highlights how the game is changing as a result of these massive goalies.
Maybe there is no foreseeable way to make the goalie smaller. Maybe you have to make the net bigger. Don’t fight using an old, losing narrative. Change the narrative. New golf-club technology made courses too short, so championship courses got longer. A lighter soccer ball allows players to do tricks with its flight, in some ways making soccer’s already huge net even bigger. A player can shoot the ball several feet outside the net’s 24-foot width and curl it around the goalie ("bend it like Beckham"). Or he can shoot it several feet above the net’s 8-foot-high bar and drop it down ("loop it like Lionel" Messi). A hockey puck is too dense and moves too fast for that. But the size of a hockey net could change, and the change needn’t be too much. Maybe only six inches or a foot wider, maybe only six inches higher. And only for those in junior and college leagues and above. Just so a goalie’s carefully constructed, seamless wall can’t cover everything. So a goalie has to move, has to play off his goal line, has to go up and down. So he has to open up. So the slivers of open space are a little bigger. So he doesn’t think he can stop everything, and a shooter can think he might score. So an unscreened shot from farther than 20 feet might go in. So more "off the rush" goals might be scored. So players would want, and need, to spread out. So the action doesn’t always funnel and congest. And the rest of the ice surface matters. So all the skills the other players have developed, and will develop, matter. So the game is defined by every player on the ice, not just the goalie. So the dog isn’t wagged by the tail.
It is interesting to see how various sports evolve to keep them competitive and exciting. Seems like making the nets slightly bigger could be a pretty compelling thing. 🥅
Mini Launch Masterclass… Big-Time Value | Jeff Walker
Great 22-minute video outlining launching a new product, and why launch is something specifically different than just releasing a new product. This is all about getting the market engaged and gaining customers. 🧑🎓
Understanding Coinbase - The Diff
Good read on the various aspects of Coinbase.
Coinbase has been growing as crypto has gotten more popular, but it's been growing its share of crypto, too, from 4.5% at the end of 2018 to 11.1% today. While this is impressive, it also means that Coinbase's custody economics will have to change as it grows; in 2020, the company earned $18.6m in custodial fee revenue in 2020, and their average share of all crypto asset custody was 10.6% for the year.
They have 43 million customers.
Johnny•Decimal
With all the various cloud services to put files I've gotten a bit lazy and sloppy with my files so method intrigued me. It seems a bit over done, but I may give this a go for some of my file archival. The "throw it in a bucket and use search" method isn't working so great for me.
Beeple NFT Sold to Metapurse Crypto Fund in Christies Digital Art Auction - Bloomberg
This headline grabbing $69.3 million digital artwork sale does look to be more publicity stunt than anything else. Metakovan has a lot of incentive to bring a lot of light to the NFT market. I think this purchase is more of a sideshow, and getting rich on art NFTs is not sensible. I do think there are a number of valid use cases around NFTs.
Handling the Emotional Weight of 1:1s | Lara Hogan
This is some excellent advice. 1:1s are critical to the relationships with your team, everyone's development, and addressing issues before they become problems. But doing them well takes emotional engagement. I particularly like the callout to doing them audio only, to focus on the content being discussed. I don't think I would do that all the time since seeing each other also opens up a lot of content sharing. But worth experimenting with.
The Non-Fungible Token Bible: Everything you need to know about NFTs - OpenSea blog
This is a comprehensive write-up on all things NFT-related. Lots of details. OpenSea also has a good beginners guide to NFTs that is a good tutorial.
Mailoji: I bought 300 emoji domain names from Kazakhstan and built an email service | Tiny Projects
A service that can give you a forwarding email address like jamie@🚀.kz. That is a neat trick, and the writeup is a fun read. I like reading about these "tiny projects" because in a way they are like a very manageable lab for the big projects companies build and launch. You can learn things at small scale that can be applied at larger scales too. 👏
Journal
From today’s Economist Espresso:
Coinbase, America’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, was valued at $68bn ahead of its planned stockmarket listing. Its previous round of fundraising in 2018 put a value of $8bn on the company. It has surged thanks to this year’s bitcoin rally. A successful public listing would be an important moment for the cryptocurrency sector, which regulators have viewed with scepticism.
$60 billion in market value in 3 years. An IPO for Coinbase would be a huge additional validator for the crypto markets.
Tyler and I read The Boy Who Would Be King together tonight. It is a good book, and the story and points are made well. The illustrations are also well done.
From today's Economist Espresso:
The valuation of Stripe reached $95bn in its latest funding round, the highest of any privately held startup in America, and more than either Facebook or Uber before they went public. The online payments processor raised $600m of new equity from investors including Allianz, AXA, Baillie Gifford, Fidelity and Sequoia Capital.
I think Stripe is a great company and one I would love to invest in. Rather than getting into the public markets, the upside potential here will be locked in even longer to only those limited VC’s and those with access. 🤨
Final day of driving today with the home stretch to Minnesota! 🙌
2:00a Daylight savings time takes an hour.
6:31a Left Liberty, MO.
7:58a Entered Iowa!
11:09a In Minnesota!
12:34p Home! 🏡
Today is the longest segment on our drive back home.
Over an hour driving through extremely dense fog.
5:31a MT Left Moriarty, New Mexico as of on Central Time.
5:55a Wagon Wheel by Old Crow Medicine Show. 🎶
8:55a CT Entered Texas.
9:58a Gas stop at Loves with crazy wind.
11:49a Enter Oklahoma.
4:19p Enter Kansas.
8:10p Drive-thru at Culver’s in Liberty, MO.
8:15p Check-in at Home2 Suites in Liberty.
Long day! One final jaunt tomorrow to home!
I can’t wait to sing Wonderwall with my fellow MN United fans soon! ⚽️🎉
Today we end our Arizona Escapades and start the long trip back home to Minnesota! We have had a great time here. 🤩 445 miles today.
Honda Pilot is packed!
9:48a Left Scottsdale.
Kids doing classes on Google Meet while driving.
1:55p Entered New Mexico.
2:30p Stop for gas in Gallup, NM.
5:00p Dinner at Green Jeans with Amore Neapolitan Pizza and Nitro Fog ice cream. 🍕🍦
6:30p Check into Best Western in Moriarty, NM.
FYI
Solar Protocol
A fun DIY solar powered network of web servers to serve static content. The idea is to have self-run servers around the world so that the sun is always powering some of them.
Charts.css
This is a bit of a "head bender." It takes HTML elements and turns them into charts via CSS.
Souped-Up Gopher: Project Gemini’s Plan to Revolutionize Internet Browsing – The New Stack
Unlikely anything like this becomes widely used, but I like the continued experimentation and focus on privacy.
RegEx Crossword
A hexagonal crossword puzzle where you have to satisfy Regular Expressions? 🤯
Fortune
Here is your fortune…
You have an unusual magnetic personality. Don't walk too close to metal objects which are not fastened down. 🧲
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About
I'm a fan of the lawn game Kubb and play on the Kubbchucks. Together with a friend of mine, we created the very first scoring & notation system for Kubb so that games can be recorded like a baseball box score. Here is an example of a game-winning turn 3ir 2f f - b b K!
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