Weekly Thing #45 / Mar 17, 2018
** Weekly Thing
Weekly Newsletter from Jamie Thingelstad
45 | Mar 17, 2018 | Permalink (|ARCHIVE|)
I returned from my India 🇮🇳 travels on Sunday afternoon, and then began to experience the worst jet lag ✈️, and pure exhaustion, I’ve ever had. 😴 It took until Thursday for me to stabalize back into something resembling a normal routine. I had a good trip, and will definitely be back, probably in the Fall.
This week marked π day as well. We celebrated at the office and at home. At the office we had 70 pies delivered 🥧, and they were gone plenty fast. At home Tammy continued the tradition of making double pie dinner with Chicken Pot Pie and a cream pie for desert. 🤤
** Photo 📷
Before leaving India we took a fun trip to Agra to see the Taj Mahal. In pictures the Taj Mahal often looks like a painting. It looks like that in person to. It was a spectacular palace to see.
Mar 9, 2018 at 9:10 PM Taj Mahal, Agra, Uttar Pradesh, India
** Links 📌
** Tech
How Atlassian moved Jira and Confluence users to Amazon Web Services, and what it learned along the way – GeekWire (https://www.geekwire.com/2018/atlassian-moved-jira-confluence-users-amazon-web-services-learned-along-way/) www.geekwire.com
I was a customer of Atlassian and felt the problems they had in their single-tennant VPS environment. We couldn’t wait for it to get fixed and ultimately moved it in-house, but it’s good to hear that they have made a full transition into the cloud. It also sounds like they evolved the solution to work better in the cloud. Hat tip to Peter Zaballos (https://meaningfulfailure.com) for the link.
The New Best Engineer | Honeycomb (https://honeycomb.io/blog/2018/03/the-new-best-engineer/) honeycomb.io
This is an exceptionally true sentiment…
As the size and sprawl and complexity of our systems skyrockets, many of us are finding that the most valuable skill sets sit at the intersection of two or more disciplines.
… and more …
You don’t need to know how to do everything under the sun. You do need to have respect for all the other disciplines that enhance your own and make your job possible, and vice versa.
This is absolutely the write way to think of being on a technology team.
ACME v2 and Wildcard Certificate Support is Live - Issuance Policy - Let’s Encrypt Community Support (https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/acme-v2-and-wildcard-certificate-support-is-live/55579) community.letsencrypt.org
Let’s Encrypt now support wildcard certificates! There are some use cases where that is needed so this is a big win for the secure web.
Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2018 (https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018) insights.stackoverflow.com
If your curious what the typical software developer looks like, this has about every dimension you could want for 100,000+ developers that took the Stack Overflow survey.
AWS Documentation is Now Open Source and on GitHub —AWS News Blog (https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-documentation-is-now-open-source-and-on-github/) aws.amazon.com
Great idea from AWS! As fast as they are releasing new services I’m sure that it is a huge challenge to keep the documentation current. This should help ensure that any issues or gaps can be remedied. Pull requests via GitHub are a lot safer than a pure wiki too.
TwitRSS.me - rss of twitter user feeds by screenscraping with perl (https://www.twitrss.me/) www.twitrss.me
If you have a need to use RSS to access Twitter.
Way back in the mists of time twitter used to have RSS feeds. It was great and people used them. I even made a twitter RSS getter form for my website so you could locate your feed. But in June 2013 they killed the RSS feeds.
Handy. And in Perl!
HyperCard Zine (https://crime.team/~hypercard/) crime.team
For people who find madly remember HyperCard this will be a fun site to watch. I created my high school humanities project in HyperCard, as well as many other projects. Wish I still had those.
** Product
DIY Wall Display | DAKboard (http://dakboard.com/blog/diy-wall-display/) dakboard.com
This would be such a fun project. Love how it looks and seems like it would be easy enough to build. 🤔
Deckset for Mac: Presentations from Markdown in No Time (https://www.decksetapp.com/) www.decksetapp.com
This looks interesting. It uses Markdown to make slides. It’s easy to generate markdown using automation. Put the two together and it would be easy to generate customized markdown and then turn it into presentation material. 🤔
** People
John Carlis (https://johncarlis.weebly.com/about.html) johncarlis.weebly.com
John Carlis was the Dean of Undergraduate Studies when I was in the Computer Science at the University of Minnesota. I took Lisp from John, and on several occasions we got a chance to catch up. He was an amazing professor and human being. Sadly the last time I saw him was at John Riedl’s funeral (https://www.thingelstad.com/2013/goodbye-to-my-friend-john-riedl/) . Also see In Memoriam: John Carlis (https://www.cs.umn.edu/news/memoriam-john-carlis) .
Stephen Hawking, one of the world’s great scientists, has died - Physics (https://www.economist.com/news/obituary/21738688-groundbreaking-physicist-was-76-stephen-hawking-one-worlds-great-scientists-has) www.economist.com
The world lost a bright star with the passing of Stephen Hawking. This obituary ends poetically:
No philosophy that puts humanity anywhere near the centre of things can cope with facts like these. All that remains is to huddle together in the face of the overwhelmingness of reality. Yet the sight of one huddled man in a wheelchair constantly probing, boldly and even cheekily demonstrating the infinite reach of the human mind, gave people some hope to grasp, as he always wished it would.
He definitely gave that hope to millions of people.
** Productivity
Checklist for Checklists - Project Check (http://www.projectcheck.org/checklist-for-checklists.html) www.projectcheck.org
Fabulous Checklist for ensuring that your Checklist is a good Checklist! Check! ✔
** Business
Toys R Us to close all 800 of its U.S. stores - The Washington Post (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2018/03/14/toys-r-us-to-close-all-800-of-its-u-s-stores/) www.washingtonpost.com
Large amounts of debt, and declining brand value.
“The liquidation of Toys R Us is the unfortunate but inevitable conclusion of a retailer that lost its way,” Neil Saunders, managing director of the research firm GlobalData Retail, wrote in an email. “Even during recent store closeouts, Toys R Us failed to create any sense of excitement. The brand lost relevance, customers and ultimately sales.”
Probably the $7.9 billion in debt was impossible to get around.
** Visualization
SankeyMATIC (BETA): A Sankey diagram builder for everyone (http://sankeymatic.com/) sankeymatic.com
This is pretty fun. Simple web front-end to put data into the D3 Sankey library and generate Sankey diagrams. Need to find a reason to use this. 👏
** Funny
xkcd: Background Apps (https://xkcd.com/1965/) xkcd.com
Oh no. I’m afraid this applies to me and my desire to intervene when people are force quitting apps. 🤦♂️
** Web
How to Balance Your Media Diet – ART + marketing (https://artplusmarketing.com/how-to-balance-your-media-diet-a2140c0311ec) artplusmarketing.com
I encourage being mindful about the information you are consuming. We watch what we eat, I don’t see a reason to not watch what we read and watch too. I’d take 90 minutes off of the scale here and give no time to what is called “consumption” and “interaction”.
** Promotion 🎁
https://www.wikitribune.com
WikiTribune (https://www.wikitribune.com) is a news platform that brings journalists and a community of volunteers together. WikiTribune just got funded and I became a backer. I’ve been impressed with Wikipedia (https://www.wikipedia.org) and am excited about Jimmy Wales (http://jimmywales.com) and team focusing on the news ecosystem. I am very curious to see how they realize these objectives. I’ve previously thought about how news can be reinvented. I focused more on the open source model instead of wiki, but either way I feel like a fundamental rethink is possible! Let’s see how they tackle this. Become a supporter today! (https://www.wikitribune.com/become-supporter/)
** App 📱
Shortcuts on the App Store
Siri Shortcuts deliver a quick way to get things done with your apps with just a tap or by asking Siri. The Shortcuts app enables you to create personal shortcuts with multiple steps from your favorite apps. Start from hundreds of examples in the Gallery or drag and drop to create your own. Shortc…
** Workflow (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/workflow/id915249334?mt=8&uo=4&at=1001lxyE&ct=thingelstad_com)
by Apple
Workflow is your personal automation tool, enabling you to drag and drop any combination of actions to create powerful workflows for your iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch.
I keep finding more uses for Workflow. The Weekly Thing newsletter is built using Workflow, and I’ve now found dozens of other routine tasks both at work and at home that I have automated with Workflow. It’s great for crafting patterned emails, and integrating data from inside iOS. This app can be hard to get started with, but it will pay off if you put the time to learn it.
Free 4.5/5 stars
** Status 🎈
Thursday @ 5:50 PM (https://micro.thingelstad.com/2018/03/15/my-dog-chase.html)
My dog Chase got some teeth pulled today and he’s really not pleased about it. 🙁
Thursday @ 5:48 PM (https://micro.thingelstad.com/2018/03/15/was-great-to.html)
Was great to catch up today with friends and MarketWatch colleagues Anna Klombies and Jim Bernard.
Wednesday @ 3:37 PM (https://micro.thingelstad.com/2018/03/14/day-shirt.html)
2018 π day shirt!
Wednesday @ 3:12 PM (https://micro.thingelstad.com/2018/03/14/teamsps-getting-reading.html)
🥧 #TeamSPS getting reading to celebrate π day!
Sunday @ 4:10 AM (https://micro.thingelstad.com/2018/03/11/091056.html)
Had a nice layover in Amsterdam. ✈️ Now flipped my clocks back to central time and am looking forward to 🛬 back home. 🏠👨👩👧👦
Saturday @ 4:05 PM (https://micro.thingelstad.com/2018/03/10/starting-flights-home.html)
Starting flights home from India! 🛫 Delhi (DEL) → Amsterdam (AMS) → Minneapolis (MSP) 🛬 Depart at 3:15 AM. 🤪
Saturday @ 3:57 AM (https://micro.thingelstad.com/2018/03/10/snake-charmer.html)
Snake charmer. 🐍
Saturday @ 3:56 AM (https://micro.thingelstad.com/2018/03/10/had-a-wonderful.html)
Had a wonderful visit to the Taj Mahal this morning. Amazing palace.
** Thanks 🎬
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