Geek culture is being against digital scarcity when you want somebody’s work for free and for digital scarcity when it helps you sell gifs for thousands in a tulipmania-style bubble.
Bonus points for harassing or sending death threats to anybody who even vaguely annoys you
“CSS Is, In Fact, Awesome - Jim Nielsen’s Blog”
CSS is my favourite part of the web stack. Web devs love to complain about it all the while publishers all over the world keep adopting it for design and typesetting.
“inessential: The lack of a price tag seems almost criminal”
“I should explain: the app is better — much better — than it would be if it were a for-pay app.”
Right chuffed to read this. 😁 Love Jeremy Keith’s writing as well 🙂
“pencil and paper thinking - daniel g. siegel”
Always link to posts that quote Alan Kay.
“8 lessons I learned from spending 4 years writing one course — Learn JavaScript - Zell Liew”
“The window.matchMedia API — Sebastian De Deyne”
TIL
“If you want to see if something works, make it. The whole thing. The simplest version of the whole thing – that’s what version 1.0 is supposed to be.”
“You Can’t Trust Amazon When It Feels Threatened - Last Week in AWS”
“While mistakes can happen and be smoothed over— deliberately lying to customers cannot be undone.”
Which type of novelty-seeking web developer are you? www.baldurbjarnason.com/2021/whic…
Not all things new and shiny are created equal.
“Management of the Absurd - Scott Berkun”
One of my favourite books on management.
“Daði Freyr (Daði & Gagnamagnið) – 10 Years (Official Video) - YouTube”
😄
“The Vast Confusion Of Implicit Assumptions Like Wages And Productivity - Ian Welsh”
Most Organisations Misunderstand Their Own Culture
This image, from Imagine That Things Can Be Different which in turn got it from the book Accelerate!, touches on an issue that has been on my mind quite a bit over the past few years.
In a more accessible format:
| Pathological (power-oriented) |
Bureaucratic (rule-oriented) |
Generative (performance-oriented) |
|---|---|---|
| Low cooperation | Modest cooperation | High cooperation |
| Messengers "shot" | Messengers neglected | Messengers trained |
| Responsibilities shirked | Narrow responsibilities | Risks are shared |
| Bridging discouraged | Bridging tolerated | Bridging encouraged |
| Failure leads to scapegoating | Failure leads to justice | Failure leads to inquiry |
| Novelty crushed | Novelty leads to problems | Novelty implemented |
Most organisations that are on the left-hand side─pathological─think they are on the right-hand side─generative─or at the very least bureaucratic well on its way towards incrementally improving itself towards a performance culture.
It’s a variation on the Dunning-Kruger effect, where people who have no knowledge or skill in a field vastly over-estimate their own capabilities. These organisations lack the skills to accurately gauge their capabilities─they lack the very thing that they need to be able to position themselves accurately in this table. Their communications are either top-down orders or backchannel gossip and collaboration and cooperation is next to non-existent.
I don’t know if it’s possible to ‘fix’ an organisation that is stuck on the left-hand side of this table. Remember, ‘power-oriented’ in this context isn’t a matter of financial power or capital but organisational power and social capital. Which means that the people who benefit the most from the status quo are the only ones who have the resources to change it. Which would mean giving up power.
And I’ve never seen anybody voluntarily give up power in an organisation like that.
A VScode-oriented take on the, now crowded, hypertext-y note-taking genre.