» The future is now: Adobe deactivates subscriptions for Venezuela. Adobe is mainly offering subscription-only products, with very limited options in case you want to buy instead of subscribe to a product. Also, they are not giving refunds to the holders of the cancelled subscriptions.

» Here’s an interesting piece on security: People where cracking old passwords encrypted by insecure algorithms. A non-standard password with special characters and numbers still took them several days to crack. Bonus points for the password being a representation of a standard opening for chess.

» Three important limits regarding Response Time.

The limits are: 0.1 second keeps the user convinced that the system is reacting instantaniously. 1 second delay still lets the user work without interruption, and 10 second delay makes the user lose attention.

» I normally don’t have the time to read long articles, especially since many texts seem to include a lot of unnecessary fluff or explanations which are not really necessary. I did, however, fully read Typing with pleasure, which explains a lot about typing in general - especially what happens between a single keypress and the finished rendering of the updated character on the screen. It even starts before that, explaining the human system and expectations before going into the technical details.

» Performance Metrics for fast web apps. This article handles lots of quirks of JavaScript in a browser. In conclusion, it’s not obvious which metrics should be used, but once you know it, it’s not too difficult:

Measure time starting at event.timeStamp

Measure time ending at performance.now() in a requestAnimationFrame()

Ignore anything that happened while the tab was not focused

Aggregate data using “% of events that are under target”

Visualize multiple thresholds

» Boris Johnson is using SEO to bury unfavorable articles. In short, Johnson gave an interview where he described himself as a “role model” to make articles about this interview rank higher than an alledged affair with a model.

This is apparently not the first time he tried this: He once gave an interview where he explained how he likes to paint buses to make reports of that interview bury the story behind him and the bus he was using when lobbying against Brexit.

» Fascinating thread about the archtitecture of SNES. It details how the SNES could be extended with additional CPUs within the cartridges, and provides screenshot of games which used that feature.

» Software Architecture is overrated, clear and simple design is underrated. This article resonates with me because I have worked with multiple teams before, with different emphasis on architecture, and I - from my anecdotal experience at least - do not think that investing more in upfront architecture is really making the software better in the long run. If you are factoring in the time to refactor as you go, and are working with skilled engineers, minimizing the upfront architecture work and focussing on clear and simple design is the key.

» Many people I know have observed the following effect: people are going through the motions of Agile, they do everything “by the book”, yet they are struggeling. Or, they are doing the same work as before without any change other than renaming their meetings to use agile vocabulary, and call themselves agile. Or, my personal favorite, working in a chaotic and unpredictable way and justifying it with the word “agile”

I recently discovered that there is a word for it, and it has been around since 2016: Dark Scrum, or, more generally, “Dark Agile”!

» On the difference between a maker’s and a manager’s schedule.

When you’re operating on the maker’s schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting. That’s no problem for someone on the manager’s schedule. There’s always something coming on the next hour; the only question is what. But when someone on the maker’s schedule has a meeting, they have to think about it.

This is why I usually recommend having meetings with developers next to the lunch break, shortly after work start or before the end of the work day. YMMV though, as different people prefer different times.

» Here are a few tools which can make your life easier on linux:

• bat is a drop-in replacement for cat, it displays line numbers, syntax highlighting and more.
• exa is a replacement for ls. Powerful features include a tree view and git information.
• oh my zsh is a great ZSH configuration with many very useful features.
• SpaceVim is a modern vim distribution. It comes with many great defaults.

Today I stumbled over this article which makes a few excellent points about how fast (in terms of lines per person per hour) a developer usually is. I like that idea a lot, even though I would never try and use it to actually assess the speed of a developer. The underlying metric takes into account lines added and lines deleted as well, so measuring on lines added only would be meaningless.

» Tanner Christensen on how his weekend project blew up on Apple’s App Store.

On March 14, 2015, while reading the book Creative Confidence, I stumbled on a single sentence that seemed to encapsulate the essence of the book in a powerful way. As a blogger and design-driven individual, I wanted to capture the quote in a captivating way that would allow me to share it quickly online.

[…]

Then, one morning a few days after Snaplight became available in the iPhone and iPad App Store, I noticed a slight uptick in downloads for it. A friend messaged me on Facebook to let me know the app was not only trending, it was being featured on the App Store homepage.

Part of this article reads as an ad for this very app, but for me, the important bit is: Scratch your own itch. Write an app which solves your problem and nothing else, to avoid optimizing it for cases which will never come. And don’t be afraid to ship as soon as you’re done!

My personal stance is: If you have 100 users complaining about your app, then it’s good news - it means that you have 100 users!

» How to harvest data from LinkedIn.

» Awesome visualization of the most popular programming languages on StackOverflow since 2008. Call me a nerd, but I really like this kind of video.