josep-panadero

> I’m increasingly convicted there is inherent value in humans doing things regardless of whether an algorithm can produce a “better” end product.

That question already existed a long time ago. In such a big world I can find a lot of people that takes better pictures than me, it is more eloquent, draws better than me, etc. But I still enjoy expressing myself. I may share a picture on Reddit or write a comment here and there not because I think that it is "better" than the rest but just because it is my own opinion and expression. I agree that there is personal value in human creation and it should be nurtured.

Something similar happened close by my old neighborhood. The river was highly contaminated by close by industry. In the 80s a new initiative started to improve the quality of the river.

Nowadays, there is promenade along the river and it is easy to see many birds around. People goes there to do jogging or cycle. The river is creating as much economic value as natural one.

But it is nor inviting nor healthy to swim in the river, there is much more work to be done.

> Sequences felt like a good use case for this when we started, [...] We’ve since moved to a different approach which enforces the behaviour we want more explicitly when creating incidents, and we learned something along the way.

The entire article shows that the author has a very good grasp as much of the technical side of development as of the business side. And the conclusion makes a lot of sense.

Sequences are a technical solution for a technical problem, how to uniquely identify new elements in a fast and reliable manner. And it is optimized for such use case. But, in the real world, users have expectations and when their mental model conflicts with the inner working of an application you end creating confusing and lack of trust. Depending on the situation, to educate the user can be the path to follow, but here it seems reasonable to just adapt the inner workings to the mental model of the users. It's faster and scales easier as the number of customers increases.

Why there is no lockdown in Sweden? One of the reasons is how legislation works in Sweden:

"Sweden cannot legally declare a full state of emergency to deal with corona, says an expert in constitutional law - and right now Sweden can't declare a lockdown and confine people to their homes either, as has been done in Britain, France, Spain and other countries.

Tormod Otter Johansen is a researcher in public law at Gothenburg University, he says, however, that legislation introducing the possibility of wider lockdowns could be introduced very quickly, as the government has shown over the past few weeks with other legislation to deal with the effect of the coronavirus."

https://sverigesradio.se/artikel/7454661

So, it is possible to change the legislation to enable the goverment to call for lockdowns, but it needs some more steps than in other countries.

The current main criticism, thou, relates to eldery care: "Corona commission criticises government over elderly care" https://sverigesradio.se/avsnitt/1625475

The current recomendations can be found here: https://www.krisinformation.se/en/hazards-and-risks/disaster...

Many interesting learnings. One of them is how much the level of abstraction has been pushed up thru the years of technological improvements. A graphic designer in 2020 does not need to know how memory works in the CPU, not even most developers need to know that.

The other learning, in the oposite direction, is about "A Pixel Is Not A Little Square" (http://alvyray.com/Memos/CG/Microsoft/6_pixel.pdf). Abstractions are really useful, but they fail in some cases. Pixels are more complex that the abstractions we use.

And, of course, the article has some beautiful graphics.

> "Pippi and the Moomins remind us that madcap humour and imaginative storytelling can convey humanistic ideas at least as powerfully as a more literal approach. "

"Moominpappa at Sea" is one of my favorte books of all time. All of the moomin books feel important and significant even that the characters are inocuous or even silly. It is easy to understand how many people missed the more adult messages of the books. But, that same style allowed children to enjoy the stories without overwhelming them.

It is a shame that in places like Japan, the characters are very well known, but the books are shadowed by the animated version. The characters are fantastic, thou.

For Pipi, everybody loves the 1969 TV show. I have read a couple of books, and I like them, but I do not have them in such regard as the Moomins books.

> Drawing helps me bring back many other emotion-related things because I begin remembering emotions I’ve implicitly stored (i.e., when the person was angry, happy, loud, etc.).

I love the sketches. I learned to draw for that reason, I add sketches to my notes. It also helps me to relax during a meeting and read the mood of the room (if I sketch facial expressions).

And, quite often, to share the sketches afterwards creates an opportunity for casual conversation and creating rapport.

I have done that in my previous two jobs. And I find it easier to do as soon as I join a new company than later. Once I get involved in projects it requires more effort to get the time. And to know everyone and their opinions is very important to get up to speed. The views of managers/product/developers/testers are not perfectly aligned. Also, it is a great opportunity to understand the views of the less vocal members of the teams. Finally, it is important to present yourself, so people have an easier time to rise any concerns when they arise.

Sadly, right now, I am technical leader for too many teams but once the situation is solved (we are hiring a new architect) my focus is on getting more regularly in contact with all teams and not just the ones working on the topics that require my attention. There are always small things that go unsaid unless done in a one on one.

One year later, I repeated - just for three teams - the ones on ones and asked for personal feedback and the general "Is there anything you think I should know about?" again. It was very insightful, and I was able to get more into the nuance of the people's views as I had more knowledge about the company.

I recommend, if you have the opportunity, to go to training on coaching. I got the training as a manager several years ago, and I found that type of training very useful for all positions and an important part missing in the software engineering curriculum. It is very difficult to help to solve technical problems without knowing the views of the people that would design and implement the details of the system. Spending time to create rapport it always pays off, and - for me - it is something fun to do.

It is fantastic how far we have gotten. I had a web in Geocities before the Yahoo purchase. It allowed 150 Kilobytes of storage and no CGI (Common Gateway Interface).

I do no see mention of size limits in the article. I just checked Firebase and the free tier allows up to 1 GiB total.

Security is the other change. To run CGI allowed control of too much for any provider to be comfortable with it. Containerization and overall Operating System improvements allow for server-side code with safety (Spectre aside).

Great article and great opportunity for anyone that wants to start small on the cloud.

I loved the Computing History museum and highly recommend a visit. I had the opportunity to write some Basic code in an old machine and play old video games.

I went walking from the train station to the museum, if you do that, you need to take into account that it is in the outskirts of the city. It may seem that you are going in the wrong direction and there is nothing there, but there is. The museum is a big warehouse in an industrial area.

> The hardware required to play the games is also preserved

You can play with real physical machines. The exhibitions change so what you can play depends on when you visit the museum. Emulation is great, but hardware preservation is important.

Their shop is an awesome place to get some gifts for your computer-loving friends.

A couple of pictures of my experience in Cambridge and the Computing History museum: https://www.josep-panadero.com/2019/05/26/may-2019-trip-to-t...