Inside the Globus INK: a mechanical navigation computer for Soviet spaceflight. Dang this thing is beautiful. And what an amazing piece of engineering.

Youth Spies and Curious Elders. Life goals: “Waters is what I call a Curious Elder — someone who manages to retain their curiosity as they age and stays interested in what young people are up to. The curious elder isn’t interested in judging youth, they’re interested in learning from them.”

The Thoughts of a Spiderweb. This is a fascinating article about animal cognition but I am especially blown away by the idea of spiderwebs being “an extension of the spider’s cognitive system” because I’m reading the sci-fi novel Children of Time right now and that is how the spiders communicate in the story.

Audi’s new EV is a luxury SUV with augmented reality that doubles as a pickup. I can’t decide if I love this or hate it.

Prisoners Usually Can’t Have Cell Phones. See How People Use Them Anyway. “Some men use their phones to take online classes, posing as regular students in the free-world, a ruse that only works in the age of Zoom classrooms and online meetings.”

It’s the Coolest Rock Show in Ann Arbor. And Almost Everyone There Is Over 65. “The show always starts at 6:30 p.m. and ends at 9 p.m., in time to get to bed at a reasonable hour.” Sign me up! (NYT Gift Link)

How ‘The Last of Us’ changed gaming, strained relationships and spawned an empire. Probably my favorite read of the week. “‘The Last of Us’ always felt like a mission statement, a game that wanted to prove that big-budget action shooters could not only have a sense of gravitas but could advance the medium in narrative, gameplay and representation.”

• The Minimalist Photography Awards for 2022 are out.
• The Cause of Depression Is Probably Not What You Think. “Depression has often been blamed on low levels of serotonin in the brain. That answer is insufficient, but alternatives are coming into view and changing our understanding of the disease.”
• The Battle Over Bike Lanes Needs a Mindset Shift. “Installing protected routes tends to boost local shops. But many store owners remain attached to their street parking—and fight to protect it.”
• Pepper spray for the school run? The weaponised SUV set to terrify America’s streets. I’m sorry what? “While its competitors offer heated seats and optional roof-racks, this souped-up SUV boasts bulletproof glass, blinding strobe lights, electrified doorhandles, and wing mirrors that can shoot pepper spray – handy for putting those pesky cyclists in their place.”
• See also Pickup trucks have gotten bigger, higher-tech — and more dangerous.
• Forget Google Maps: Why Paper Map Sales Are Booming (WSJ paywall, here’s an archive.is link). The kids are going analog. “While a satellite can highlight unpaved paths, cartographers actually walk down them.”
• At least let the CD die with some dignity. Amen. “Nothing in music is permanent. So if it is to die, the CD at least deserves to leave with some of its dignity intact rather than being coldly sent off with a shrug. The CD was of enormous significance but its place in history is being lost.”
• In happier music news, check out radio’s comeback! Public Radio Stations KEXP, KUTX, KCMP Grow Audiences With New Music. “A handful of public radio stations dedicated to playing new music have enjoyed notable ratings bumps in recent years. During this ‘crisis’ for new music on the airwaves, these stations have excelled at finding, and holding on to, listeners excited by the prospect of discovering a track from an artist they’ve never heard of.”

In his article Engineering Maturity Model Mike Fisher shares how he thinks about the importance of different team capabilities when building software organizations. Despite how some maturity models—such as the Capability Maturity Model (CMM)—have been misused in the past, Mike encourages us to look past the process and focus on the principles. Here’s the important part:

[The layers] aren’t stages in that you’re never really finished with any of them but you do need to have the ones at the base stronger and more developed than the ones further up or else you are certain to run into problems. […]

While I do think of this kind of like a maturity model, they are not stages that one achieves and moves on from. These are areas that one must keep returning to and keep investing in, always from the bottom up. Getting over your skis and investing too much in the top, which is very tempting for startups, is fraught. Too many product development teams without continued investment in the infrastructure or deployment pipeline can slow everyone down, proving Brooks’s Law. The important task for Engineering leaders is to determine when and how much investment gets made into each of these layers.

To put it another way, if the base of your infrastructure and deployment pipeline is shaky, an increased focus on product development is eventually going to bring the whole house down. Click through to the article to see Mike’s full model.

Every few days I post some links to things I enjoyed that don’t neatly fit into the topics I usually cover on this blog. Use it to fill your reading queue with interesting stuff.

• The Most Ridiculous and Weird Tech Gadgets From the Last 25 Years. “The Hushme was a ‘voice mask’ intended to let you make phone calls without bothering anyone.”
• Between-time by Mandy Brown. “We live in a world full of distractions but short on breaks. The time between activities is consumed by other activities—the scrolling, swiping, tapping of managing a never-ending stream of notifications, of things coming at us that need doing. All that stuff means moments of absolutely nothing—of a gap, of an interval, of a beautiful absence—are themselves absent, missing, abolished.”
• Movie Trailers Keep Tweaking Well-Known Songs. The Tactic Is Working. (NYT gift article link) “As a composer, Rosen is at the forefront of the trailerization movement: He’s in demand for his ability to rework existing songs to maximize their impact in trailers for films and TV shows.”
• All Human Systems are Enormous Trash Fires. “Once you recognize that all human systems are enormous trash fires, you stop trying to figure out how to switch to a system that isn’t an enormous trash fire, since they don’t exist. […] Eventually you even start to appreciate the beauty of it. How impressive it is that we manage to get anything done at all, given how completely trash everything is, and how on fire it is all the time.”
• This is a beautifully-written piece about standup comedy but also about so much more. I don’t want to spoil it, except to say it starts like this: “Perhaps due to lockdown and the interruptions to normal service, but more likely due to autumnal intimations and a long dormant weakness for sentimentality, I now cherish the belief that the only flavour for which a grown-up should cultivate a taste is the bittersweet.”
• KC Green reflects on creating the “This is Fine” meme. “When a work gets as big as this has, is it still yours?”
• Eightify: AI Youtube Summary with GPT. A Chrome plugin that promises: “Instant AI summaries for Youtube videos using GPT. Summarize video into 8 key ideas.”
• Can Doom Run It? An Adding Machine in Doom. “I demonstrate that it is possible to run any bounded computation in Doom, minus constraints on level size.”

Every few days I post some links to things I enjoyed that don’t neatly fit into the topics I usually cover on this blog. Use it to fill your reading queue with interesting stuff!

• The Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2022 Winners are out.
• Did the Music Business Just Kill the Vinyl Revival? “On an aggregate level, consumers are simply not buying music. They prefer to stream it for pennies rather than purchase it for dollars.”
• How Do Big Tech Giants Make Their Billions? I know infographics are so 2000s, but this comparison data is super interesting.
• This week’s useful app → Readow provides book recommendations powered by AI.
• This week’s WTF Link → The lights have been on at a Massachusetts school for over a year because no one can turn them off. “The lighting system was installed at Minnechaug Regional High School when it was built over a decade ago and was intended to save money and energy. But ever since the software that runs it failed on Aug. 24, 2021, the lights in the Springfield suburbs school have been on continuously, costing taxpayers a small fortune.”
• This week’s Gen X link → Remembering horse_ebooks in the age of GPT3. “it’s this fear of the uncanny which i think drove the negative response to the discovery that horse_ebooks was actually no longer a bot at all. more than the disgust at feeling like you’d been played in service of a viral marketing campaign, the deeper sense that a future is coming where it won’t be possible to reliably tell the difference between bot activity and human activity lay underneath that negative reaction. and ten years later - that future is here.”

This is an interesting interview with Richard Culatta, author of Digital for Good: Raising Kids to Thrive in an Online World. They discuss how to help kids bridge the gap between physical and digital spaces, how to model good technology behavior, and more. This is such a good point:

By focusing on screen time we miss the far more important concept that we should be teaching our kids; screen value. Some digital activities are just not a good use of a kid’s time (eg. playing a repetitive, luck-based game) while others provide much greater value (eg. editing a movie, creative writing, FaceTiming with a grandparent, etc.) And context is important to consider too. Digital activities that are appropriate on a long car-ride will likely be different than those on a beautiful spring day when friends are around, or the day before a large school project is due.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that is something that not only kids need to learn. We can all benefit from this lesson:

The most important lesson we can teach young kids is to recognize that some digital activities provide more value at some times than others. This means evaluating each digital activity on its own merit based on the circumstances.

We should probably also remember that controlling children’s behavior with screen time leads to more screen time:

Researchers investigated the impact of parenting practices on the amount of time young children spend in front of screens. They found a majority of parents use screen time to control behavior, especially on weekends. This results in children spending an average of 20 minutes more a day on weekends in front of a screen. Researchers say this is likely because using it as a reward or punishment heightens a child’s attraction to the activity.

In Getting to the Heart of Digital Accessibility Carie Fisher makes a compelling argument for making accessibility a priority in tech companies. Her conclusion really resonated with me:

Maybe I’m naive, but I’d like to think we’ve come to a point in our society where we want our work lives to have meaning. And that we don’t want to just hear about the positive change that is happening, but want to be part of the change. Digital accessibility is a place where this can happen! Not only does understanding and writing purpose-driven code help people with disabilities in the short-run, I believe strongly that is key to solving the overarching diversity issue in tech in the long-run. Developers who reach Stage 4: Understanding, and who prioritize accessible code because they understand it’s fundamentally about people, will also be the ones who help create and cultivate an inclusive environment where people from more diverse backgrounds are also prioritized and accepted in the tech world.

She mainly mentions developers in this article, but I’d argue that it is very much also the responsibility of product managers to make sure accessibility is always in the discussion on projects. We need to make sure that if extra time is needed for accessibility, we build that into the planning.

Further reading

For some practical advice on how to make emails more accessible, see Accessibility vs. Inclusion: What it Takes to Create More Inclusive Email Marketing Experiences and Email Accessibility: Looks aren’t everything.

For an example of how not to approach this topic, see Should websites be accessible to everyone? Domino’s says no.

Karolina Szczur makes some excellent points about using “technical debt” as an excuse for subpar products in The Technical Debt Myth:

Technical debt becomes a convenient blanket statement entailing frustrations, rushed decision-making, lack of process or architecture, and tedious maintenance tasks — the get-out-of-jail-free card for delivering a subpar experience.

It’s crucial to understand that as software and design grows older, that doesn’t necessarily mean we’re dealing with debt. We must look deeper under the surface to find the root cause of bottlenecks we’re facing. Only when we carefully assess the symptoms can we find solutions to building products that last.

While we’re on the topic, the most useful article I’ve read on technical debt is Henrik Kniberg’s Good and Bad Technical Debt (and how TDD helps) from way back in 2013. He discusses good debt, bad debt, and the importance of having a “debt ceiling”. Highly recommended post, and still very relevant.

The transcription of Cennydd Bowles’s talk on ethics in technology at SustainableUX 2019 is absolute gold and a must-read:

It’s a mistake to separate technical capabilities from human capabilities. These things act together. They become interwoven, hybridized actors. Things change what people can do and how they do it. It is true to an extent that old sage that guns don’t kill people; people do. But a gunman, the hybrid actor of a human and a technology coming together, sure as hell can.

So we have to abandon this belief that the things we build are just neutral tools. We have to recognize therefore that we can’t wash our hands of the social, ethical and political consequences of our work. This can be a tough sell to some. Technology and algorithms and then the bedrock of it all, data, are often seen as clean, objective, neutral things.

He gives lots of practical advice on how to make ethical thinking part of our work — including viewing ethics as just another design constraint, like any other. And for a more… uh… “incendiary” approach to this topic, also see Mike Monteiro’s We Built A Broken Internet. Now We Need To Burn It To The Ground.

Jeremy Keith writes about the developer community’s need to always talk about new things in Dev perception. I think the same can be said for every other profession, including product management:

It’s relatively easy to write and speak about new technologies. You’re excited about them, and there’s probably an eager audience who can learn from what you have to say.

It’s trickier to write something insightful about a tried and trusted (perhaps even boring) technology that’s been around for a while. You could maybe write little tips and tricks, but I bet your inner critic would tell you that nobody’s interested in hearing about that old tech. It’s boring.

The point he makes in his post is a very good one — that we should always evaluate any technology (or, in our case, methodology or framework) based on appropriateness, not newness. It reminds me of Kellan Elliott-McCrea’s excellent list of questions a team should answer before they decide to adopt a new technology in their software development process.