Weekly news roundup – 11/2015

• “Living under permanent surveillance and what that means for our freedom”

  Ai Weiwei is one of the most important artists in the world. He contributed to Bird’s Nest stadium in Beijing. He’s living under permanent surveillance. Could our future be like his present?

• “What I Wish I Knew When I Started My Career as a Software Developer”

  This is an answer to the Quora question What do software developers age 30 and over know now that they wish they had known in their 20s? by Michael O. Church. He shares his thoughts about his experiences in software development. A very good read for every software developer.

• “All this boils down to one simple thing. Professionals are willing to say “No”.”

Uncle Bob is one of my models. I read just about everything he’s wrote. In this post he shares an important lesson. We are professionals, and we should know when to say “No”, even if it means to put our job on the line.

• “How to best build an engineering team”

  What’s a CTO? And a Lead Architect? What about the VP Engineering? And what duties pertain to the Program Manager? Mark Suster shed a light on this topic.

• “Are you REALLY doing your best? Seriously, are you?”

So what exactly is my advice? Own the fuck up. You know good and well what you hate about yourself. You know good and well what makes the guilt-record taunt you when you can’t sleep at night. And you know good and well that your little nest of self-loathing has become a dangerously cozy comfort zone.

• “The tradeoffs of (accidentally) discarding continuous integration”

  This is my week’s favourite. Have you ever thought that, with feature branching, you are throwing away continuous integration? Maybe this advises don’t apply to small teams, but they are something to keep in mind. A great post byNeal Ford

• “From a UX perspective though, adding instructions on how to click a link is not optimal”

  Did you know about the download attribute in HTML5? Me not, really. We can stop telling our users to “right-click and save as”

• “we invent cooking patterns – an abstraction on top of each ingredient / action pair”

  I’m a disaster at cooking. But I liked this idea of transposing Design Patterns to cooking. I hope they will keep the pace and add as many patterns as possible.

• “seemingly normal programmers I ran into were sociopaths who had experienced the trauma of learning to code”

  We’ve all been through it. If only someone could tell us what to do next… But life is hard. After the first steps in learning how to code, you are on your own, really. A nice analysis by Erik Trautman.

• “Ask anyone and they’ll tell you that carousels are an anti-pattern. But maybe it’s not so”

Are carousels really an anti-pattern? Personally I hate them. But on the mobile, they seems to work good. With data, you need to consider the context, all the time.