Weekly Thing #197 / Cloudflare, Bunches, Float
I’m Jamie Thingelstad, and this is the Weekly Thing. One of the delights of sending this email is hearing from you! Hit reply and say Hi…
Another week with some technical difficulties getting in the way of my publishing schedule. Shortcuts is definitely buggy in iOS 15 and the interoperability with some apps has issues. 😬 I’m going to have to find some workarounds for a little bit. Maybe simplifying to reduce some of these dependencies.
Sometimes you get an opportunity to really appreciate how lucky you are in life, and this week I got one of those moments when I was selected as one of TwinCitiesCIO‘s 2021 CIO of the Year recipients. So many kind words from friends and colleagues. 🙏
And now, let’s get to the links from the week… 👇
Featured
Cloudflare’s Disruption – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
Ben Thompson sharing some brilliant observations on the strategy that Cloudflare is pursuing in the cloud market. Tons of Clay Christensen references here from both Thompson and Matthew Prince of Cloudflare.
In other words, I would be Cloudflare: I would charge marginal rates for my actual marginal costs (storage, and some as-yet-undetermined-but-promised-to-be-lower-than-S3 rate for operations), and give away my zero marginal cost product for free. S3’s margin is R2’s opportunity.
I’ve got a lot of respect for Cloudflare. They have built incredible, foundation layer technology that is making the web better every day. Honestly I’ve always considered them to play at the network layer up, as an accelerator and optimizer. As a potential full-cloud provider, I would watch them closely.
This will be very interesting to watch over the coming years. 🍿
Pickup truck runs over 6 cyclists in Waller County, 4 people hospitalized
In 2001 I flew to Fredericksburg, Texas with my bike to take part in Hell Week Texas, 8 days riding 100-mile century ride each day. Texas Hill Country has some immense climbs, so it is great for training. The roads are also very nicely paved so it’s great riding.
On one day as we were riding in a small group a pickup truck drove by our group going really fast and super close to us. Instead of pulling over and giving us a nice gap on our bikes, the driver intentionally had actually swerved over to the shoulder in an attempt to scare us (or something) by coming really close to us. I have no idea why people feel a need to do this stuff to cyclists, but it happens.
Our group was shocked by how close the truck was but there wasn’t much of anything for us to do. Yelling or finger gestures are not a terribly smart move for a cyclist in this situation.
As we rode along a few more miles we came upon a group of cyclists stopped. That same truck had continued to “buzz” cyclists but they got this one wrong and had hit one of the cyclists in another group. A helicopter was called and the rider was going to be airlifted to a hospital. The driver had left the scene and a group of riders was waiting for the police to come.
I have no idea why some drivers feel a need to bug cyclists, but this news article from Houston hit a nerve with me given this previous incident. How can it be that the driver of the truck hasn’t been charged with his lawyer claiming he had no criminal intent. He was taunting cyclists and trying to annoy them. I don’t think he intended to run over six people, but he did. 😥
Currently
Listening: I’ve been digging Sam Harris stuff lately and I have always been a fan of Ricky Gervais, so it was kind of a no brainer for me to buy Absolutely Mental where Harris and Gervais talk through a wide variety of topics with humor and insight.
Installing: Now that iOS 15 supports Safari Extensions we are seeing some fun things coming out. I’m not a fan of Google Amp pages, and Amplosion is a handy one-time purchase to make the web AMP-free!
Late blooming flowers with busy bees collecting pollen. 🐝
Sep 26, 2021 at 4:00 PM
Pamela Park, Edina, MN
Notable
AWS Step Functions Supports 200 AWS Services To Enable Easier Workflow Automation | AWS News Blog
This is a pretty massive expansion in capability for Step Functions.
Today AWS Step Functions expands the number of supported AWS services from 17 to over 200 and AWS API Actions from 46 to over 9,000 with its new capability AWS SDK Service Integrations.
You can now create much more sophisticated functions in Lambda that you can then build on top of for more server-less solutions.
My Dad | Humidity and Hope
I follow Hugh Hollowell‘s newsletter. He writes from a very personal place. This writeup about losing his Dad a year ago to COVID is touching.
fractional.art
Service to allow people to buy NFT’s in groups, or buy just parts of an NFT. This doesn’t look to be a DAO like Flamingo, but has very similar characteristics. Via Nifty Tables.
I Just Don’t Want to Be Busy Anymore by Elena Salaks | Forge
There have been a couple of times in my career that I truly entered a “burnout” phase. Once you start to figure out some signs that you can detect, I think you can manage and make less pronounced changes to modulate your energy. The most important take away from this article is having the dialog with your manager and being open about it. I suspect that many people that experience these burnout feelings are important members of a team, and it is in the best interests of the team to help people not get burnt out.
Masked Email from Fastmail and 1Password protects your identity online
Masking your email address is a really powerful tool to protect your privacy online. It is common for services to generate a token or hash from your email address and use that to target and profile you. So, even though you of course use different passwords everywhere, you can easily be tracked and matched if you use the same email address. However, using different email addresses takes time. I’ve been doing this with Fastmail’s previous routing support, but this new masked mail service works for sending too and gives you metrics on how frequently the email address is used.
Now, connecting it to 1Password is a stroke of genius. When registering a new account using a masked email address you often are copy/pasting both an email address and generated password. Now it is super easy to do both right in the browser, and save the credentials for safe keeping in 1Password.
I’ve been a happy customer (family accounts!) of both Fastmail and 1Password for years now. I highly recommend both of them.
Bunches • Start Your Bunch
Interesting service that lets you create a topical Twitter-like experience, but just for that topic. You can be in multiples. Sort of like IRC channels really. Even supports paid channels.
The Diamond
Mesmerizing 16-minute video with people searching for diamonds atop an ancient volcano. Not really about the diamonds, but about the stories, and the people. The interview with the director is a good read too.
The Most Important iPhone Ever – Asymco
I waited in line for that very first iPhone. It has been amazing to see this device revolutionize so much around us.
What makes the iPhone and perhaps Apple special is that it seems to deliver things that nobody asks for but then everybody wants while eschewing overshooting a performance dimension that a few demand but most won’t use.
Honestly we may never see another product as disruptive as this in our lifetime.
The Internet’s Original Sin by Charlie Warzel - Galaxy Brain
Great dive into the incredibly complex world of online advertising, and the impacts on our privacy and much more.
But the more I started reporting on digital privacy issues, the more it became extremely clear that this huge, opaque online advertising ecosystem was a lucrative blackbox, powered by our personal data. It grew faster than anyone could regulate it, so it was barely regulated. It was (is) ripe with billions of dollars of fraud per year ($52 billion in 2020). And because the system is so hard to understand, it’s ripe for bad actors to use it to pollute the internet with garbage ads. The online ad ecosystem is helping to fund most every publication — including those that spew hate or misinformation. The online ads game is at the center of Google and Facebook’s dominance, too. Most everything bad about the internet (and a lot of good things too) has at least a little bit to do with this ecosystem.
🤔
‘Float,’ a film shot on iPhone - YouTube
This is a beautiful and touching short film about a daughter and father. Notable that it is shot directly on an iPhone 13 Pro using the new cinematic capabilities. But honestly, its just a great 3 minutes. via Daring Fireball.
How Big Tech Runs Tech Projects and the Curious Absence of Scrum - The Pragmatic Engineer
It is certainly common for people to look at other companies and try to emulate what they do hoping to have the same successes. This article looks at team practices to deliver software, and there really is no correlation. This doesn’t surprise me at all. The way that you choose to build software is not based solely on the size of your organization, it has a ton of other inputs, most of which are more important than size. The short answer here is that each company has to figure out how to best deliver software for their situation. Sorry, there are no shortcuts here.
“A township where one primitive forest waves above while another primitive forest rots below, — such a town is fitted to raise not only corn and potatoes, but poets and philosophers for the coming ages.” — Henry David Thoreau, “Walking”
Journal
We sought out the Animales Burger trailer at Bauhaus Brewing Co tonight. Our first time trying their burgers and they were incredible! Wow! 🍔
This is how we wish every MN United home game ended! Wonderwall! 🤩⚽️🖤💙
Great first half of Minnesota United v Houston Dynamo. MNUFC leading 2-0. ⚽️
I love this view. No matter how many times I’ve seen it. 🖤💙
GO UNITED! ⚽️
Ordered iPhone 13 Pro for Tammy and I. Both 512 GB. Sierra Blue for her, Silver for me. Trying out the iPhone 13 Pro Clear Case with MagSafe this time.
We made some more Wicky Thing Candles this morning. 🕯
Mazie’s job was cutting down wax for the melting pots. She had some fun with the wax while doing it. 🤩
We went to the Edina Homecoming Parade after the kids got done with school today. It was fun to see a High School Marching Band.
Reply All
Here are some replies from Weekly Thing #196 / iPhone 13, iOS 15, watchOS 8.
It turns out that David O’Hara (@davoh) is very familiar with the book I’m reading…
That Nature/Walking volume is one I’ve been teaching for 20 years. Those texts are like palimpsests of everything Emerson and Thoreau ever read, and they’re also like thickets in which you can enter and, moments later, lose sight of the trail. I love them both.
I love that. And Joe Waters (@joewaters) had additional suggestions for further reading…
Forget NATURE, read Emerson’s ESSAYS FIRST SERIES. Self-Reliance, Compensation, Spiritual Laws are great. Then jump over to CONDUCT OF LIFE and read his essay Fate.
Great one volume book on Emerson: MIND ON FIRE. Great bio written by a great man!
Briefly
Simple, direct. Good things to keep in mind. → 12 Things Smart Leaders Don’t Say | Leadership Freak
Good article with Simone Biles catching up with her since her decision to not compete in Tokyo. Our family was eager to watch her sweep the medals, and it was shocking when she decided to withdraw. → Simone Biles Chose Herself
I’ve gotten to work with Jade Denson at MnTech and I am super excited about her leading up this effort! 👏 → Jade Denson to Lead MnTech Talent Initiatives » MnTech
Authoritarianism comes in all different flavors. That really should not be surprising at all. The authoritarian part comes before the flavor that that particular group or individual pursuits. → How Experts Overlooked Left-Wing Authoritarianism - The Atlantic
This is so great. 🤣 → A hamster has been trading cryptocurrencies in a cage rigged to automatically buy and sell tokens since June - and it’s currently outperforming the S&P 500 | Markets Insider
It is fun to see Twitter trying stuff, innovating, again. → Twitter accelerates again with Bitcoin tips, NFTs, recorded Spaces, creator fund and more | TechCrunch
Incredibly detailed and thorough walk-through of all the new stuff in iPadOS 15. If video is your preferred way of learning, I can guarantee you will find some new stuff in here. → iPadOS 15 Walkthrough: EVERYTHING You Need To Know! - YouTube
If you are looking for a method to remember a large number of things, memory palaces are a well known solution. → An ultimate guide to memory palaces
Fortune
Here is your fortune…
You are a bundle of energy, always on the go.
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About
I’ve been an active blogger since 2004. I’ve been microblogging via Twitter and my websites since 2006. My link blog goes back to 2005. I think about the Internet and our use of it over decades and am focused on preserving the personal and non-commercial parts of the Internet as well as the corporate and governmental parts. I’m a long-time supporter of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Creative Commons and Internet Archive as well as other organizations that work on this.
This work by Jamie Thingelstad is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
My opinions are my own and not those of any affiliates. The content is non-malicious and ad-free, posted at my discretion. Source attribution is omitted due to potential errors. Your privacy is respected; no tracking is in place.