Web Review, Week 2022-37
Let’s go for my web review for the week 2022-37.
W4 Games raises $8.5 million to support Godot Engine growth – W4 Games
Tags: tech, 3d, godot, business
This could be good news, let’s hope this really pushes Godot forward.
https://w4games.com/2022/09/13/w4-games-raises-8-5-million-to-support-godot-engine-growth/
Privacy vs “I have nothing to hide” - Kev Quirk
Tags: tech, privacy, surveillance
As if we still need people to be convinced… apparently we do. So just in case we need a well built argument about it, this post does it.
https://kevquirk.com/privacy-vs-i-have-nothing-to-hide/
Microsoft Teams stores auth tokens as cleartext in Windows, Linux, Macs
Tags: tech, microsoft, security
So they’re seriously not using the system credential management to store these… I mean OK if your machine is compromised there’s not much you can do. But for a laptop being stolen for instance it’d make sense for such tokens to be protected by default and require a passphrase to be read by a local application, otherwise you could just easily recover it from the disk if it’s not encrypted.
A taxonomy of hosting options, for personal data security
Tags: tech, self-hosting
This is a welcome list of options to clarify what we’re talking about when we talk about “self-hosting”. It’s not a single concept but a range of approaches.
https://thomask.sdf.org/blog/2022/09/15/a-taxonomy-of-hosting-options.html
QR codes | Dan Hollick 🇿🇦
Tags: tech, barcode, qrcode
Nice explanation on how QR codes are made. The most gritty details are left out so it’s easy to follow.
https://typefully.com/DanHollick/qr-codes-T7tLlNi
Transcending POSIX: The End of an Era? | USENIX
Tags: tech, system, unix, posix
Very interesting piece. Goes in length about the UNIX history and the evolution of POSIX. It also highlight its limitations and where the design needs to evolve.
https://www.usenix.org/publications/loginonline/transcending-posix-end-era
The Little Things: My “radical” opinions about unit tests
Tags: tech, tests, tdd
Some good points in this list although I’m not in full agreement with everything (especially the one about the lack of usefulness for TDD). The importance and the impacts of the tooling is often underestimated indeed. The last two random opinions about mocking and overtesting are very much true as well.
https://codingnest.com/the-little-things-my-radical-opinions-about-unit-tests/
9 Practices that Haunt Developers Working with Scrum | by Willem-Jan Ageling | Serious Scrum | Sep, 2022 | Medium
Tags: tech, project-management, scrum, agile
Lots of truth in there. Indeed the proposed “practices” when they get in just kill the promises of things like Scrum.
https://medium.com/serious-scrum/9-practices-that-haunt-developers-working-with-scrum-e5903b8500f0
⭐️ How management by metrics leads us astray
Tags: management, metrics
A good reminder about the impacts of Goodhart’s law, or even simply of measuring the wrong thing. I like the conclusion overall: it’s fine to measure things but that shouldn’t be the center of the decision taking and conversations need to take a larger role into it.
https://jakobgreenfeld.com/metrics
First rule of the team: size
Tags: management, team
Good points to keep in mind regarding team size. It’s a delicate balance to strike in an organization.
https://medium.com/@kolyaskink/first-rule-of-the-team-size-94cdad8bc79e
ZeroBanana – Senior Engineers are Living in the Future
Tags: tech, organization, information
Interesting point of view. Indeed what might look like magic skills can simply be about having gathered more information. That thus depends on the organization.
https://www.zerobanana.com/essays/living-in-the-future/
Etsy Engineering | Blameless PostMortems and a Just Culture
Tags: management, failure, postmortem, safety, psychology
If you want to get to the bottom of a problem and of why an accident happen, people need psychological safety. This is indeed necessary if you want them to share truthfully why the accident happened in the first place. Otherwise fear will drive the conversation and hide important facts.
https://www.etsy.com/codeascraft/blameless-postmortems
Quality Is Systemic - Jacob Kaplan-Moss (jacobian.org)
Tags: tech, quality, team
In our industry, we obsess too much over individual performance. In turn it means that the systems we put in place within or around our teams get neglected… this is a problem because it is what has the biggest impact on quality and performance.
https://jacobian.org/2022/sep/9/quality-is-systemic/
Bikes, Not Self Driving Cars, Are The Technological Gateway To Urban Progress
Tags: tech, urbanization, bike
Please this, I’d love to see more bikes everywhere.
The world’s 30 most beautiful bookshops
Tags: book, library, travel
Definitely a good list of places I’d love to visit and get lost into.
https://nitter.42l.fr/AlexAndBooks_/status/1550145062260117506
Bye for now!