- The origin of Ruby on Rails: Haven’t used ror professionally but it has had an impact on my work life for sure. It has influenced many frameworks.
- Wild World: “You don’t have to keep it together. Losing it sometimes is OK.”
- Gov.uk design system: Guidelines for gov’t sites including color, layout, patterns of data collection with forms, and ready made components. This looks very helpful for developers and designers.
- Things I learned the hard way: Doing it work is the hard way. :)
- The primacy of testing - Brian didn’t always thing about his test suite first
- Invest in tools - Make the tools you need
- Debug by asking questions - You want to be able to ask questions of your system during / after an event
- Understand bad / odd behaviour
- As much as you can try to understand weird stuff that happens in the system
- There’s an assumption you have that’s wrong
- Take half-measures on vexxing problems
- vexxing is not-reproducible and hard to reason about because of complexity (psychotic! lol)
- If you can’t because this isn’t always possible, instrument to give you more context the next time it happens
- Technology choices should not be made lightly
- Predictions reflect the present
- Be careful about trusting them blindly
- How often have mine been wrong?!
- Use values as lens for hiring
- I love oxide’s hiring method so much. Listened to a podcast recently about this.
- Spec / description of admission control webhook server in kubernetes: Describes communication patterns, request messages, responses and related stuff. Nice spec for something like this. Also liked the standardized message envelope for requests / responses.
- Popovers, tips, html: Popovers without a lot of extra html, css and javascript
- Byte order mark: Last week I learned about the BOM. A magic sequence of bytes at the beginning of a text file that tells you with a high degree of confidence that you’re looking at a unicode document, the encoding of said document, and the endian-ness of the byte order. Allegedly windows software (some) will stamp it on files. I’m sure other things do it as well but it’s potentially hit and miss. (Note the use of “high degree of confidence” language above) Encodings and character sets are hard. But so is language I guess …
- How to Meet WCAG (Quick Reference): Quick reference of wcag accessibility a11y guidelines with filtering that allows you to pick level, tag and a few other ways to dig into the material. Great resource.
- level a: minimal conformance to wcag guidelines
- level aa: acceptable
- level aaa: optimal
- possibly getting from a -> aa is less hard than aa -> aaa
Videos, Monktoberfest 2022
Introspection gaps
- asshole is something we all do some of the time, it’s not a way to define us
- the former lets us identify ourselves this way more easily and grow
- conflict (disagreement) vs fighting (desire to force a win-lose situation)
- have you actually listened to the other person?
- thesis: we’re all assholes some of the time
- goal: limit blast radius of our asshole behaviour
- choose when you’re going to pick a fight - when does it matter
- don’t pick a fight when …
- DO as a principle: try to focus on our impact to others when they’re feeling bad, and their intentions with us when we’re feeling bad
