Weekly Thing #68 / Aug 25, 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
68 / Aug 25, 2018
This week has been challenging on a couple of fronts. The news of David Hussman’s passing (https://www.caringbridge.org/visit/davidhussman2/journal/view/id/5b798405ec1003404f0f1ee1) spread quickly this last weekend. 😢 I’ve lost one other friend to cancer (https://www.thingelstad.com/2013/goodbye-to-my-friend-john-riedl/) , and he also seemed to be doing better than expected for a long time, and then his health went downhill very quickly. I don’t know if that is common with cancer, but it feels like it is tricking you.
At home, our dog Chase had a difficult week. 🐕 He tore one of his CCL’s, which is the dog version of an ACL, and his right hind leg went lame. He was hobbling around and a couple of days later he tore the other CCL as well, and for a day couldn’t walk or even stand. I’ve been carrying all 80 pounds of him up and down stairs the last few days and trying to get him to rest. He’s 11 years old, and on top of this issue he has melanoma. Damnit cancer! He doesn’t have a lot of time left and we want to make sure what he has is good. His knees have been slowly improving, and he has some pain medication to help as well. I think he will get past the CCL issues and get some more time.
We are officially saying goodbye to summer now. School starts on Monday, and with it the normal rhythm of the year resumes. Many changes, and behind it all the constant tick-tock of time. ⏳
My Blog Posts ✍️
Goodbye to my friend, David Hussman (https://www.thingelstad.com/2018/goodbye-to-my-friend-david-hussman/)
The last time I saw my friend David Hussman we met at Red Wagon Pizza and enjoyed an extended evening of pepperoni pizza and several glasses of a delicious red wine.
Featured Links 🏅
Beyond Interactive: Notebook Innovation at Netflix – Netflix TechBlog – Medium (https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/notebook-innovation-591ee3221233) medium.com
The scale of this effort at Netflix is amazing.
Every day more than 1 trillion events are written into a streaming ingestion pipeline, which is processed and written to a 100PB cloud-native data warehouse. And every day, our users run more than 150,000 jobs against this data, spanning everything from reporting and analysis to machine learning and recommendation algorithms.
I haven’t used Jupyter (http://jupyter.org) but it looks really compelling. I like how Netflix is using them for the exploration, as well as putting them into production pipelines.
My Weekly Photo 📷
Evening fire at the lake.
Evening fire at the lake. Aug 18, 2018 at 8:32 PM Cannon Lake, MN
Notable Links 📌
7 Leadership Qualities That Make for an Awesome Leader - Toggl Blog (https://blog.toggl.com/leadership-qualities/) blog.toggl.com
These are all good areas for leaders to consider and focus on.
Want to scale agile? Don’t. Descale the work first. Achieve big through small. (https://medium.com/@jonathansmart1/want-to-scale-agile-dont-descale-the-work-first-achieve-big-through-small-7bdd09962540) medium.com
There is some very good thinking here on how to bring agility to organizations.
Apple Pencil Note-Taking: Why You Should Use Apple Notes, actually. — Kenneth Reitz (https://www.kennethreitz.org/essays/apple-pencil-note-taking-why-you-should-use-apple-notes-actually) www.kennethreitz.org
I have tried a surprisingly large number of iPad note taking apps to use with the Apple Pencil, and I agree with Reitz’s conclusion.
Apple Notes is hands-down the most well–designed, thought–through note taking app available for the iPad Pro. It is exceptionally well designed, and if you leave your preconceptions about what a note–taking app should do, I think you’ll find yourself agreeing with me, once you give it a real try/chance.
He didn’t mention it in his writeup, but Notes also does limited handwriting recognition as well, which allows searching of notes if your handwriting is legible.
Quit wasting your precious energy - a n n i e m u e l l e r (https://anniemueller.com/quit-wasting-your-precious-energy/) anniemueller.com
What a great essay from Annie Mueller!
Energy is the currency of the universe. You don’t do anything to deserve it and you’re free to spend it however you want. I just want you think about it. What do you want? Is that what you’re getting? What bargains have you made?
Energy is necessary for everything, just like time. Time without energy isn’t worth much. 🤔
Code Review Review is the Manager’s Job (https://hecate.co/blog/code-review-review-is-the-managers-job) hecate.co
Interesting perspective on the critical role that code reviews play in establishing the culture of a team and for individual team members to learn. I would be very skeptical of a manager being the one to do the code reviews, but I do think it makes a lot of sense for managers to stay engaged in the process and participate so they can steer the other aspects of the organization that are impacted by code reviews.
The easiest way to keep your web apps accessible: Just use text (https://blog.logrocket.com/the-easiest-way-to-keep-your-web-apps-accessible-c2b57506cc2a) blog.logrocket.com
Accessible web pages are often just better web pages. This pattern repeats over and over again, in technology as well as in the world at large.
Time Is Money, Spend It Wisely | YNAB (https://www.youneedabudget.com/time-is-money-spend-it-wisely/) www.youneedabudget.com
Tammy and I have used YNAB for a few years now. I’m a fan of GTD. It’s like peanut butter and chocolate putting these concepts together. 👏
Global Passport Power Rank | The Passport Index 2018 (https://www.passportindex.org/byRank.php) www.passportindex.org
I saw this article about traveling the world (https://www.bucketlistly.blog/posts/how-to-travel-third-world-passport-thai) and it linked to this Passport Power Rank. I hadn’t really considered this, but when traveling with some colleagues a while back one of them commented that a US passport comes with significant benefits. Turns out Singapore has the most benefits of all!
Hacker Newsletter - The Hacker News Newsletter (https://hackernewsletter.com/) hackernewsletter.com
I don’t like the comment section of Hacker News, so this weekly newsletter is a great way to get the curation of Kale Davis (http://kaledavis.com) for the notable things to see on Hacker News each week.
Red Bull Trans-Siberian Extreme (https://www.redbull.com/us-en/events/red-bull-trans-siberian-extreme) www.redbull.com
I had not heard of this event and it is a monster “15 stages over the course of 25 days and covering a total of 9,100km”. iI reminds me of the Race Across America (http://www.raceacrossamerica.org) , but intentionally more difficult in terrain.
Give Back 🎁
https://www.eff.org
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (https://www.eff.org) is the leading nonprofit organization defending civil liberties in the digital world. I have been a member of the EFF for years. Not only is the EFF working hard to protect you on the Internet they have also recently launched solutions like Privacy Badger (https://www.eff.org/privacybadger) and the critically important Let’s Encrypt (https://letsencrypt.org) service to make encrypting web servers free to anyone. Support the EFF with a donation (https://supporters.eff.org/donate) !
Yet More Links 🍞
- PyPy.js (https://pypyjs.org/) pypyjs.org Python running in your browser? Yep.
- Where Vim Came From (https://twobithistory.org/2018/08/05/where-vim-came-from.html) twobithistory.org Interesting to read the lineage of one of my preferred editors.
- Favorite Sayings (http://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/sayings.php) web.stanford.edu Some fun insights here.
- (An ((Even Better) Lisp) Interpreter (in Python)) (https://norvig.com/lispy2.html) norvig.com The title of this says it all. Extremely techie stuff to follow. 👩💻
- The eno notation language and libraries (https://eno-lang.org/) eno-lang.org Another plaintext format for data, an alternative to JSON, YAML, TOML and others.
- Publii - Open-Source CMS for Static Website (https://getpublii.com/) getpublii.com Interesting desktop app to create a static-site to then push to a server somewhere.
Microposts 🎈
Tuesday @ 9:37 PM (https://micro.thingelstad.com/2018/08/21/a-few-days.html)
A few days ago my dog Chase injured his CCL (Dog version of ACL) in his right hind leg. Today he injured the other one and is unable to walk. He’s older and also has melanoma, so surgery isn’t an option. Hoping he gets mobility back in a few days. 🤞🏻😢
Sunday @ 9:13 PM (https://micro.thingelstad.com/2018/08/19/started-allergy-medicine.html)
Started allergy medicine — I don’t remember a year that I had to start this early! 😕💊
Sunday @ 4:55 PM (https://micro.thingelstad.com/2018/08/19/very-sad-to.html)
Very sad to hear of the passing of my friend David Hussman (@davidhussman). We will all miss you dude! 😢 See his CaringBridge site (https://www.caringbridge.org/visit/davidhussman2/journal) .
Saturday @ 4:39 PM (https://micro.thingelstad.com/2018/08/18/very-happy-with.html)
Very happy with the new stone steps down to our dock! 🤩
e672000f25.jpg
Friday @ 10:22 AM (https://micro.thingelstad.com/2018/08/17/very-impressive-work.html)
Very impressive work being shared by the #TeamSPS summer interns! They delivered significant capabilities in products and services core to SPS! We are lucky to have such talented interns! 🙌
c5deab44de.jpg
Fortune 🥠
You’ve made it all the way to the end! 👏 Here is your fortune for this week.
I am rubber and you are glue. Your words bounce off me and stick to you.
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