Weekly Thing #43 / Mar 3, 2018
** Weekly Thing
Weekly Newsletter from Jamie Thingelstad
43 | Mar 3, 2018 | Permalink (|ARCHIVE|)
I was able to transition the Weekly Thing to this new custom template without breaking everyone’s email experience! 🙌 I can now happily continue to make small tweaks to improve the experience. 🔧 My brief experiment with serif fonts only lasted one issue though.
Here in “the North” ❄️ the days are getting longer and warmer. It’s very nice to see the sun more. I am going to leap frog all that and head to India for the first time this week. I’m hopeful the 100 degree temperatures and transition to full sun ☀️ doesn’t cause me to melt. 💦
** Blog 📬
** Book: Why Buddhism Is True (https://www.thingelstad.com/2018/book-why-buddhism-is-true/)
Good read connecting Buddhist concepts and practices to benefits in modern life.
** Your Version Number (https://www.thingelstad.com/2018/your-version-number/)
Applying Semantic Versioning to every day of your life.
** Photo 📷
This section of Minnehaha Creek, as it leaves Lake Harriet, never freezes. We went on a walk during a recent dumping of snow, and it was cool to see all these ducks in the creek, braving the winter, with snow piling up on their backs.
Feb 24, 2018 at 7:46 PM 1401–1467 W Minnehaha Pkwy, Minneapolis MN
** Links 📌
** Security
A 1.3Tbs DDoS Hit GitHub, the Largest Yet Recorded | WIRED (https://www.wired.com/story/github-ddos-memcached/) www.wired.com
I’m continuously surprised why GitHub is so frequently the target of DDoS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial-of-service_attack) attacks, but this is an amazing timeline:
GitHub briefly struggled with intermittent outages as a digital system assessed the situation. Within 10 minutes it had automatically called for help from its DDoS mitigation service, Akamai Prolexic. Prolexic took over as an intermediary, routing all the traffic coming into and out of GitHub, and sent the data through its scrubbing centers to weed out and block malicious packets. After eight minutes, attackers relented and the assault dropped off.
That is an impressive, automated response to such a significant event. 👏
AgileBits Blog | Finding Pwned Passwords With 1Password (https://blog.agilebits.com/2018/02/22/finding-pwned-passwords-with-1password/) blog.agilebits.com
It’s awesome to see AgileBits incorporate the Pwned Password (https://www.troyhunt.com/ive-just-launched-pwned-passwords-version-2/) service from Troy Hunt (https://www.troyhunt.com) within 24 hours of it being released! Also great that this is going to be incorporated into the Watch Tower capability of 1Password. I’m a big fan of 1Password for Families (https://1password.com/families/) . I’d recommend all families use it to share secrets and passwords.
** Software
David Lynch Teaches Typing by RhinoStew (https://rhinostew.itch.io/david-lynch-teaches-typing) rhinostew.itch.io
This is so weird, but I’m a David Lynch (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Lynch) fan so it’s pretty fun.
** Business
Amazon Agrees to Buy Smart-Doorbell Startup Ring - Bloomberg (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-02-27/amazon-com-is-said-to-agree-to-buy-smart-doorbell-startup-ring) www.bloomberg.com
$1 billion dollars? Wow, that makes no sense to me. 💰
Berkshire Hathaway 2017 Annual Report (http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/2017ar/2017ar.pdf) www.berkshirehathaway.com
Warren Buffett’s shareholder letter is always a great read. Nea
The $65 billion gain is nonetheless real – rest assured of that. But only $36 billion came from Berkshire’s operations. The remaining $29 billion was delivered to us in December when Congress rewrote the U.S. Tax Code.
44% of their gain was a result of the tax overhaul. The read on his 10-year “bet” against managed funds is very good (news flash, the index fund won). Plus bonus points for quoting Kipling.
Flavors of Engineering Management · [Thinking inside a large box]; (http://blog.benjamin-encz.de/post/flavors-of-engineering-management/) blog.benjamin-encz.de
Interesting look at some different ways to manage engineering teams. I’ve always done “Product Team Engineering Manager” structure.
Introducing C.A.R.E. – a simple framework for user onboarding - Inside Intercom (https://blog.intercom.com/c-a-r-e-simple-framework-user-onboarding/) blog.intercom.com
Solid set of practices from Intercom on how they do customer onboarding. This is a huge area of focus for SaaS companies, particularly B2C ones.
As your business grows and gets different types of customers, your onboarding will need to adapt. You’ll never be “finished” working on onboarding. And even your most loyal and active customers need to be continually onboarded to new areas of your product.
You have to adapt these plays in the B2B market but the thinking behind this is what I would attempt to model. 🤔
** Programming
Forde’s Tenth Rule, or, “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and ❤️ the State Machine” (http://raganwald.com/2018/02/23/forde.html) raganwald.com
Good introduction to state machines and how they are used in programming to deal with complexity. If you are around programmers and have heard state machines referenced this is a good introduction to the concepts and benefits.
Requests-HTML: HTML Parsing for Humans™ (https://github.com/kennethreitz/requests-html) github.com
A new Python module from Kenneth Reitz (https://www.kennethreitz.org/projects) of Requests (http://docs.python-requests.org/en/master/#) fame. Reitz designs modules very well and this is worth looking at. Previously, the go to for this thing was Beautiful Soup (https://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/) .
** Web
Erasing history - Columbia Journalism Review (https://www.cjr.org/special_report/microfilm-newspapers-media-digital.php) www.cjr.org
The permanence of digital content is something I think about for personal websites, but I hadn’t considered how damaging that intersection could be for newspaper sites. I’ve supported Internet Archive (https://archive.org) for years and their mission is to capture and save content. It seems like a good path would be for news websites content management systems to directly archive content into a place like Internet Archive and not rely on the web crawler to capture it.
Small b blogging (http://tomcritchlow.com/2018/02/23/small-b-blogging/) tomcritchlow.com
I like this thought about how to approach blogging.
Small b blogging is writing things that you link back to and reference time and time again. Ideas that can evolve and grow as your thinking and audience grows.
Personally I think of my blogging activity as being as much or more for me as a way to clarify my thoughts and share learning, and if others dig it that is cool too.
** Self-Improvement
Live Like a Hydra – Thinking Is Hard – Medium (https://medium.com/thinking-is-hard/live-like-a-hydra-c02337782a89) medium.com
I’ve read Nassim Nicholas Taleb (http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com) ‘s Antifragile (https://www.amazon.com/Antifragile-Things-That-Disorder-Incerto/dp/1400067820/) but this essay on applying anti fragile concepts to your life is interesting:
An antifragile way of life is all about finding a way to gain from the inevitable disorder of life. To not only bounce back when things don’t go as planned, but to get stronger, smarter, and better at continuing as a result of running into this disorder.
Thought provoking. 🤔
The two mental shifts highly successful people make — Quartz (https://qz.com/1213777/the-two-mental-shifts-highly-successful-people-make/) qz.com
This is an interesting read and challenges many thought patterns. I like the model it suggests of two shifts, and how different those shifts may be. Give this one a read and reflect on it for a while.
Brave Enough | Jessie Diggins (http://jessiediggins.com/brave-enough/) jessiediggins.com
Fabulous post from Olympic athlete Jessie Diggins (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jessica_Diggins) on goal setting and her approach to the 2018 Winter Olympics. Thanks to Leah Cunningham (https://www.linkedin.com/in/leahcunningham/) for the link.
** Privacy
Differential Privacy for Dummies – Roberto Agostino Vitillo’s Blog (https://robertovitillo.com/2016/07/29/differential-privacy-for-dummies/) robertovitillo.com
The first I heard of differential privacy was when Apple started to use the term to describe how they use advanced data techniques to make smart recommendations without reducing privacy. This paper is filled with more math than I can follow, but it explains a bit more about what differential privacy really is.
Differential privacy formalizes the idea that a query should not reveal whether any one person is present in a dataset, much less what their data are. Imagine two otherwise identical datasets, one with your information in it, and one without it. Differential Privacy ensures that the probability that a query will produce a given result is nearly the same whether it’s conducted on the first or second dataset.
If your working on systems that collect user data and also want to protect privacy this would be a good read.
** Sports
Duluth welcomes home golden curlers | Minnesota Public Radio News (https://www.mprnews.org/story/2018/02/26/victorious-mens-curlers-come-home-duluth) www.mprnews.org
🏅 Great to see the Gold Medal US Curling team coming back home to Minnesota! 👏
** Culture
programmers-oath: An oath for programmers, comparable to the Hippocratic Oath (https://github.com/Widdershin/programmers-oath) github.com
I’ve written a lot about the intersection of programming and ethics. Specifically the idea of a moral oath that programmers should vow to uphold. Here is someone taking an initial attempt to put something like that together. 🤔
** Tech
Oscar Forner’s personal website (https://oscarforner.com/2018/02/24/Software_development_using_Bash) oscarforner.com
Honestly bash (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bash_%28Unix_shell%29) would be in my top 5 most often used tools and I know many people turn there nose to it. This writeup on tooling around bash though, including formatting, listing and unit testing is pretty cool. I had no idea there was a linter for bash!
Google Cloud Platform Blog: 12 best practices for user account, authorization and password management (https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2018/01/12-best-practices-for-user-account.html) cloudplatform.googleblog.com
Thorough list of things that you need to deal with if you are building an authentication system.
Feed43 : Convert web pages into professionally looking RSS feeds (https://feed43.com/) feed43.com
I use feed readers extensively and it’s a bummer when there is a website that doesn’t have a feed for what I want. This site allows you to parse the HTML of the page and create an RSS feed from it. This could be handy to have.
** Productivity
Things 3 From an OmniFocus and TaskPaper User —Macdrifter (http://www.macdrifter.com/2018/02/things-3-from-an-omnifocus-and-taskpaper-user.html) www.macdrifter.com
I was very interested to read this. I’ve been an OmniFocus user since it was in beta, and lately Things 3 continues to get a lot of positive comments. I’ve considered switching, but I really don’t want to do that. Switching task managers Is a major pain. This review ultimately came down on Things 3, but I’m going to wait for OmniFocus 3 before I make any decision.
** Promotion 🎁
https://minnestar.org
Minnestar (https://minnestar.org/) is the technology community for Minnesota. If you are passionate about technology you need to go to Minnebar and Minnedemo. Did you know that Minnebar is the largest BarCamp (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BarCamp) in North America and one of the largest in the world? Its also been going on for over 10 years? Minnedemo is the best place to hear about innovative tech and fun projects in the Twin Cities area. I am on the Minnestar board and I focus on Minnestar as one of the driving forces improving and expanding the technology community in the area. Minnestar is a 501c3 non-profit. Become a Community Supporter today! (https://minnestar.donortools.com/)
** App 📱
Still Mind - Meditation Timer on the App Store
Still Mind is the perfect minimalist meditation timer. It includes everything you need, regardless of your style of meditation, in an intuitive and beautiful interface. Key Features: * Select the length of your meditation session from 1 to 90 minutes. * Select your favorites from 5 carefully chose…
** Still Mind - Meditation Timer (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/still-mind-meditation-timer/id1070999873?mt=8&uo=4&at=1001lxyE&ct=thingelstad_com)
by 1092599.com
Still Mind is the perfect minimalist meditation timer. It includes everything you need, regardless of your style of meditation, in an intuitive and beautiful interface.
Want a minimal meditation app to simply keep track of time, work on your iPhone and Apple Watch, and integrate with HealthKit? This is the one.
Free
** Status 🎈
Friday @ 9:24 PM (https://micro.thingelstad.com/2018/03/02/dan-wilson-allrequest.html)
Dan Wilson (https://danwilsonmusic.com) all-request on piano. 🎹
Friday @ 9:01 PM (https://micro.thingelstad.com/2018/03/02/dan-wilson-taking.html)
Dan Wilson (https://danwilsonmusic.com) taking the stage for his 3-ring Binder “all-requests” show at Icehouse! 🎶👍🏻
Friday @ 8:57 PM (https://micro.thingelstad.com/2018/03/02/fun-performance-of.html)
Fun performance of The Lion King at Justice Page Middle School tonight! 🎭
Tuesday @ 9:12 PM (https://micro.thingelstad.com/2018/02/27/still-finding-altos.html)
Still finding Alto’s Odyssey (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/altos-odyssey/id1182456409?mt=8&uo=4) very fun. Great game! 👍🏻
Monday @ 10:53 PM (https://micro.thingelstad.com/2018/02/26/im-amazed-at.html)
I’m amazed at the “superpowers” Workflow (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/workflow/id915249334?mt=8&uo=4) gives me from my phone! Automating routine things! 🙌🏻
Monday @ 9:11 PM (https://micro.thingelstad.com/2018/02/26/my-sons-nd.html)
My sons 2nd grade class also has a mindfulness practice. It’s a great idea and it seems to work for them. 🧘♀️🧘♂️
Monday @ 9:09 PM (https://micro.thingelstad.com/2018/02/26/i-got-to.html)
I got to be a guest reader in Tyler’s class today. Was fun to pick out a bunch of books for the 2nd Graders. 📚
Sunday @ 8:33 PM (https://micro.thingelstad.com/2018/02/25/another-very-good.html)
Another very good meal at Martina (https://www.martinarestaurant.com/) . Shaved brussel salad, beet salad, swordfish and panqueque. Wow!
Sunday @ 2:17 PM (https://micro.thingelstad.com/2018/02/25/theatre-this-afternoon.html)
Theatre 🎭 this afternoon. Make Believe Neighborhood (https://hobt.org/events/make-believe-neighborhood-18/) at In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre.
Saturday @ 9:27 PM (https://micro.thingelstad.com/2018/02/24/mass-start-speed.html)
Mass Start Speed Skating reminds me a lot of track cycling.
Saturday @ 5:57 PM (https://micro.thingelstad.com/2018/02/24/interesting-strategy-in.html)
Interesting strategy in Curling.
Saturday @ 5:28 PM (https://micro.thingelstad.com/2018/02/24/congratulations-to-duluth.html)
Congratulations to Duluth Curling Club (https://www.duluthcurlingclub.org/) for bringing home the first US Gold in Curling.
Saturday @ 5:23 PM (https://micro.thingelstad.com/2018/02/24/forestryiohttpsforestryio-is-working.html)
Forestry.io (https://forestry.io) is working great for me. Removes the friction from static blogging. 👍🏻
Saturday @ 5:16 PM (https://micro.thingelstad.com/2018/02/24/if-curlinghttpsenwikipediaorgwikicurling-can.html)
If Curling (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curling) can be an Olympic sport than surely Kubb (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kubb) could be too. 🤞🏻
Saturday @ 4:20 PM (https://micro.thingelstad.com/2018/02/24/macos-photos-app.html)
macOS Photos app grinds my laptop to a crawl. Fans blaring, everything sluggish. Very frustrating. Seemingly doing nothing and it’s taking 280% and more of CPU.
Saturday @ 10:55 AM (https://micro.thingelstad.com/2018/02/24/we-made-meals.html)
We made 34,344 meals, enough to feed 94 kids for a year!
Saturday @ 10:53 AM (https://micro.thingelstad.com/2018/02/24/we-packed-boxes.html)
We packed 22 boxes at Feed My Starving Children (https://www.fmsc.org) this morning! 🙌🏻 Tyler picked a great event for his birthday!
Saturday @ 9:00 AM (https://micro.thingelstad.com/2018/02/24/at-feed-my.html)
At Feed My Starving Children (https://www.fmsc.org/) to pack meals. Tyler wanted to come here for his birthday. Love this handmade graph of progress.
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This work by Jamie Thingelstad (https://weekly.thingelstad.com/) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/) .
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