Weekly Thing #62 / Jul 14, 2018
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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
62 / Jul 14, 2018
It has been a busy (good!) return from a very relaxed holiday week. Through an odd sequence of events I’m going to two baseball games and two soccer games in a week! ⚾️⚽️⚾️⚽️🙌 No complaints as I enjoy both a lot.
Shorter collection of links this week in part due to my busy social calendar. 😇 One of the treats I get from sending this weekly newsletter is hearing from you! 👩💻 If something stands out to you, or you just want to say “Hi”, it is as simple as sending a reply! 📬 (Wait, did that rhyme?) 🤣
Featured Links 🏅
Relentlessly Turning Input Knobs To 0 - Feld Thoughts (https://www.feld.com/archives/2018/07/relentlessly-turning-input-knobs-to-0.html) www.feld.com
I feel like I’ve been doing this for a few years now. I would add another thought though, which is I would start with turning the input channels as low as possible, and then reduce the number of things in those channels. Right now I only have three channels that are meaningful: email (traditional, regular email), messages (95% iMessage) and feeds (all via Feedbin). Note that social media isn’t a channel. Then I filter inside those channels.
How the Disposable Straw Explains Modern Capitalism - The Atlantic (https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/06/disposable-america/563204/) www.theatlantic.com
I thoroughly enjoyed this article both for the content and the history covered, but the twist at the end makes you think, a lot. Don’t cheat and read the end first! 🙂
My Weekly Photo 📷
The corn is definitely “knee high before the 4th of July”!
Cornfield with barn in background. Jul 6, 2018 at 2:51 PM Warsaw, MN
Notable Links 📌
The rise of ‘pseudo-AI’: how tech firms quietly use humans to do bots’ work | Technology | The Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/06/artificial-intelligence-ai-humans-bots-tech-companies) www.theguardian.com
I wonder how many AI services are augmented or in some cases just done by people.
“Using a human to do the job lets you skip over a load of technical and business development challenges. It doesn’t scale, obviously, but it allows you to build something and skip the hard part early on,” said Gregory Koberger, CEO of ReadMe, who says he has come across a lot of “pseudo-AIs”.
Skipping the hard part could be a cost optimization to get validation quicker, or it could invalidate your entire business model.
Managing Digital: Concepts and Practices (http://pubs.opengroup.org/opengrouppress/managing-digital/) pubs.opengroup.org
New-ish book from Charles Betz (https://www.linkedin.com/in/charlestbetz/) , published in the open on the web.
My answer would be that there is something different happening this time — digital delivery is becoming core, not context. The convergence of an abundance of computing resources, improving software development management, combined with a change in market focus from the supplier to the customer is changing the way we view Enterprise Architecture and IT management, and identifying the need to develop a digital workforce. The defining characteristics of a digital enterprise are becoming clear: * Products or services that are either delivered fully digitally (e.g., digital media or online banking), or where physical products and services are obtained by the customer by digital means (e.g., online car sharing services) * A “digital-first” culture, where the business models, plans, architectures, and implementation strategies start from an assumption of digital delivery * A workforce who is digitally savvy enough to execute a digital-first approach
I met Charles once at the Chaos Day event here in Minneapolis. He has a comprehensive and deep view on technology.
Leadership Style Colors | Lara Hogan (https://larahogan.me/blog/leadership-style-colors/) larahogan.me
This article instantly made me think of Insights (https://www.insights.com/us/) which I have used through Discovery Yourself (https://discoveryourself.com) many times. I’ve seen teams get value out of having shared language around colors and style. This suggestion is to build on that to be more comprehensive, and also to try operating in other colors, which I think is something you have to do from time-to-time. I lead red/blue myself.
You are your Metadata: Identification and Obfuscation of Social Media Users using Metadata Information (https://www.ucl.ac.uk/~ucfamus/papers/icwsm18.pdf) www.ucl.ac.uk
More research that shows how precise identification cane be on metadata alone.
We demonstrate that through the application of a supervised learning algorithm, we are able to identify any user in a group of 10,000 with approximately 96.7% accuracy. Moreover, if we broaden the scope of our search and consider the 10 most likely candidates we increase the accuracy of the model to 99.22%. We also found that data obfuscation is hard and ineffective for this type of data: even after perturbing 60% of the training data, it is still possible to classify users with an accuracy higher than 95%.
I still don’t think this message is widely understood. When people are told that only metadata is kept on their activities, they assume some level of anonymity. You should assume none.
9 Tips To Better Networking (Even For Introverts) - Toggl Blog (https://toggl.wpengine.com/get-better-networking-introverts/) toggl.wpengine.com
Some simple tactics for approaching business networking. This is something that I always have a hard time with.
Tools & Craft - Episode 01: Andy Hertzfeld (https://www.notion.so/tools-and-craft/01-andy-hertzfeld) www.notion.so
Andy Hertzfeld (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Hertzfeld) is one of the original designers of the Macintosh computer and this short interview with him has some fun insights.
REST vs GraphQL APIs, the Good, the Bad, the Ugly | Moesif’s Musings on Software (https://www.moesif.com/blog/technical/graphql/REST-vs-GraphQL-APIs-the-good-the-bad-the-ugly/) www.moesif.com
I love the conclusion in this overview.
In fact, GraphQL vs REST is like comparing SQL technologies vs noSQL. There are certain applications where it makes sense to model complex entities in a SQL Db. Whereas other apps that only have “messages” as in high volume chat apps or analytics APIs where the only entity is an “event” may be more suited using something like Cassandra.
We always do this in tech it seems, too much “versus” as opposed to it’s just different and serves a different solution. Again, pick the right tool for the job. 🔨
Exclusive: Twitter is suspending millions of bots and fake accounts every day to fight disinformation - The Washington Post (https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/07/06/twitter-is-sweeping-out-fake-accounts-like-never-before-putting-user-growth-risk/?noredirect=on) www.washingtonpost.com
Hundreds of millions of Facebook accounts deleted. Now, “Twitter suspended more than 70 million accounts in May and June, and the pace has continued in July”. What a mess.
A Guide to Letting Go of Shame & Fear : zen habits (https://zenhabits.net/shameless/) zenhabits.net
We all could use better ways of dealing with this little (or not so little) voice in our head.
Currents: A quarterly report on developer trends in the cloud (https://www.digitalocean.com/currents/june-2018/) www.digitalocean.com
Some interesting data on the state of a number of technologies and the industry.
Currents is a quarterly report on developer cloud trends that we created to share our knowledge with the broader community. For the fourth edition, we surveyed nearly 5,000 respondents from around the world about themselves, the tools they use and the challenges they face.
🤔
Brutalist Web Design (https://brutalist-web.design/) brutalist-web.design
I like this translation of Brutalist Architecture (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brutalist_architecture) to the web.
Give Back 🎁
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/)
Yet More Links 🍞
- Apple updates MacBook Pro with faster performance and new features for pros — Apple Newsroom (https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2018/07/apple-updates-macbook-pro-with-faster-performance-and-new-features-for-pros/) www.apple.com Maybe I can finally buy a new MacBook Pro? 💻
- Road Trip (https://roadtrip.glitch.me/) roadtrip.glitch.me Interesting web app that highlights points of interest as you drive around.
- Perspective Icons for OmniFocus 3, by Josh Hughes (http://omnifocusicons.josh-hughes.com/) omnifocusicons.josh-hughes.com Nice icons for OmniFocus perspectives. Stylistically match with the new OmniFocus 3!
- Custom Perspectives for OmniFocus 3 - Learn OmniFocus (https://learnomnifocus.com/perspectives/) learnomnifocus.com The revamped perspective editor in OmniFocus 3 is enabling some very nice features. Here are some good examples to start with.
- Tones | Katharos Tones (https://www.katharostones.com/) www.katharostones.com Cool collection of notification sounds. Nice $10 upgrade for your phone.
- New Getting Things Done for Teens book - Getting Things Done® (https://gettingthingsdone.com/2018/07/getting-things-done-for-teens/) gettingthingsdone.com My copy of this is on the way. I’m curious to see if it’s something my daughter may like.
- Betamagic - News Explorer (https://betamagic.nl/products/newsexplorer.html) betamagic.nl Brand new RSS Reader for the Mac, uses iCloud to synchronize. I’ll be sticking with Feedbin but I like to see innovation in this space.
- Theater of Your Mind Presents: It’s 2:47 AM! - McSweeney’s Internet Tendency (https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/theater-of-your-mind-presents-its-2-47-am) www.mcsweeneys.net We’ve all been here. 😳
- From data to Viz | Find the graphic you need (https://www.data-to-viz.com/) www.data-to-viz.com Cool idea. You describe the data you want to visualize, and it recommends the best methods to use for the visualization.
- Browsh (https://www.brow.sh/) www.brow.sh Web browsers running in a terminal have always been a thing, but this is a pretty different take on that. This is using Firefox underneath, and then sort of painting the display in text? Weird.
- Optimize Website Speed With Chrome DevTools | Tools for Web Developers | Google Developers (https://developers.google.com/web/tools/chrome-devtools/speed/get-started) developers.google.com Very deep overview for optimizing site performance.
Microposts 🎈
Wednesday @ 7:37 PM (https://micro.thingelstad.com/2018/07/11/mn-united-game.html)
MN United game! #TeamSPS ⚽️
Wednesday @ 7:17 PM (https://micro.thingelstad.com/2018/07/11/minnesota-united-fc.html)
Minnesota United FC v Costa Rica’s Deportivo Saprissa! ⚽️ Light crowd tonight. #mnufc
Wednesday @ 6:07 PM (https://micro.thingelstad.com/2018/07/11/sps-brewoff-brewers.html)
SPS Brew-Off brewers awaiting the announcement of the winner! EDIPA and DC4UIPA had my backing! Orange Creamsicle Beer was delicious too! 🍺
Wednesday @ 6:05 PM (https://micro.thingelstad.com/2018/07/11/sps-brewoff-with.html)
SPS Brew-Off with Kubb! Go #TeamSPS! 👍
Monday @ 8:12 PM (https://micro.thingelstad.com/2018/07/09/good-night-for.html)
Good night for a Twins game! ⚾️ Twins v KC Royals!
Sunday @ 5:26 PM (https://micro.thingelstad.com/2018/07/08/my-turing-tumble.html)
My Turing Tumble (https://www.turingtumble.com) games arrived! I’m looking forward to making some mechanical computers 👍🏻, maybe even with the kids! 😊
Saturday @ 1:43 PM (https://micro.thingelstad.com/2018/07/07/184319.html)
Mazie and I had a great 18.4 mile bike ride today on the Sakatah Singing Hills State Trail (https://www.dnr.state.mn.us/state_trails/sakatah/index.html) . This has to be one of the nicest rides in the state, with much of it under the shade of trees. 🚴♀️🚴♂️
Friday @ 6:33 PM (https://micro.thingelstad.com/2018/07/06/the-distillery-at.html)
The distillery at 10,000 Drops (https://www.10000drops.com) . 10k💧
Friday @ 6:18 PM (https://micro.thingelstad.com/2018/07/06/enjoying-a-cocktail.html)
Enjoying a cocktail at the brand new 10,000 Drops (https://www.10000drops.com) distillery in Faribault. Delicious drinks! 🍹 Also pizza from Pizzeria 201 (http://pizzeria201.com) in Montgomery made from their food truck here. Worth a trip! 👍🏻
Friday @ 2:07 PM (https://micro.thingelstad.com/2018/07/06/the-best-bike.html)
The best bike rides have a Dairy Queen in the middle! 🚴♂️ + 🍦 = 😊
Fortune 🥠
You’ve made it all the way to the end! 👏 Here is your fortune for this week.
Do unto others as you would have them do to you.
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