23 / The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Unexpected

Hey, hope your week was good. I added a new category called Favourites, let me know what you think! See you next week 👋🏻

Tweet Of The Week

Daily standup? How about daily lie down in a bed and close your eyes for a few minutes. — @lynnandtonic on Twitter

Favourites

• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Unexpected (ferd.ca) — Fred Hebert about the best ways to handle the unexpected (mostly bugs and undefined behaviour).
• Every engineer should do a stint in consulting (cloudirregular.substack.com) — Forrest Brazeal about the upsides of having some experience in consulting (or similar roles) as an engineer.
• The Builder’s High (2014) (randsinrepose.com) — Michael Lopp about the joys of building things.
• Engineer vs Entrepreneur Mindset (kerkour.com) — Sylvain Kerkour compares the engineer and entrepreneur mindsets and what both could learn from each other.
• Dead white man’s clothes: How fast fashion is turning parts of Ghana into toxic landfill (abc.net.au) — Linton Besser about the consequences of fast fashion in the west.

Culture

• Developer, You May Need a Co-Founder in Marketing (microfounder.com) — Rauno Metsa about the importance of marketing, especially for solo developers.
• The Two-Jobby Problem (ez.substack.com) — Ed Zitron about a piece in The New Yorker about people doing two jobs at the same time and why the framing could be better.
• I ruin developers’ lives with my code reviews and I’m sorry (habr.com) — Philipp Ranzhin talks about how he changed they way he treats less experienced developers and why.
• Coordination models - tools for getting groups to work well together (rubick.com) — Jade Rubick about his toolbox of coordination models.
• Code runs on people (rachelbythebay.com) — Rachel argues that it’s too easy to say code just runs on a computer, it’s the people that have to work with it, that matter.

Software Engineering

• Writing class documentation (rant.gulbrandsen.priv.no) — Arnt Gulbrandsen has some great tipps on how to write good class documentation.
• CS 6120: Loop Perforation (cs.cornell.edu) — Oliver Richardson, Alexa VanHattum and Gregory Yauney about the concept of Loop Perforation (basically skipping some iterations of a loop), implemented in LLVM.
• Ship / Show / Ask (martinfowler.com) — Martin Fowler has an interesting alternative to the exclusive PR workflow.
• The Importance of Not Over-Optimizing in Rust (youtu.be) — Lily Mara in a great talk at RustConf about premature optimisation in Rust. .clone() is fine!
• how to update [go] APIs for generics (github.com) — Russ Cox on the Golang GitHub repository discussions asks about ways to keep backwards-compatibility while introducing generic variants of existing functions.
• Write code that’s easy to delete, and easy to debug too. (programmingisterrible.com) — Tef has 5 rules to write code that’s easy to debug and delete).

Cutting Room Floor

• The Sample (thesample.ai) — Jacob O’Bryant built a newsletter aggregator that learns what you like and sends you newsletters that might interest you. Give it a try! (Referral-link)
• Useful Spy Books (berthub.eu) — Bert Hubert has a list of great spy books. I just ordered Tower of Secrets and can’t wait!
• Two new color spaces for color picking - Okhsv and Okhsl (bottosson.github.io) — Björn Ottosson discusses the history of colors spaces like HSL and HSV and their problems, then proposes a modern alternative.
• The effects of remote work on collaboration among information workers (nature.com) — A group of authors at nature analysed communication data of Microsoft employees over 6 months. TL;DR: Less information transfer between teams, more asynchronous communication.

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