frasergraham - Tumblr blog

[frasergraham]

Maciej Ceglowski:

After losing data or passwords, this is the about the worst kind of mistake I can make.

The heart of the problem was that it turned out to be possible to ask the Pinboard database to “give me only bookmarks where the privacy flag is set to zero’” and still get back results where the privacy flag was on. This is like accidentally baking something by putting it in your freezer. Unexpected.

In my email to users, I promised to give a more public and technical explanation of what I did wrong:

Many lessons to be taken from this brilliant post detailing exactly what mistakes led to a minor privacy breach for Pinboard.

This is exactly how to deal with sort of problem, fast, detailed and honest follow up explaining anything you could want to know about what happened, why it happened and why it should never happen again.

More importantly for me is that pride can often ruin the objectivity of a programmer, it's hard to admit your own mistakes and in his post Maciej clearly shows his desire to be honest and highlight what he did wrong and why it happened. Humility makes for a better relationship between an engineer and their work.

This post was an admission of a privacy issue which would normally make people less comfortable with the service, but I found it makes me even happier to have chosen Pinboard as my bookmarking tool of choice and even more likely to reccomend it to others.

[frasergraham]

Would you go to Mars?

I would. The first flight would be risky; if I felt comfortable that the company’s mission will continue, that my kids have grown up, then I’d be on the first mission.

Inspiring.

[frasergraham]

Mike Bostock...

Above all, animation should be meaningful. While it may be visually impressive for bars to fly around the screen during transitions, animation should only be used when it enhances understanding. 

Mike (the author of d3.js) has written a ton of great articles on visualization and continues to open my eyes to a world of cool stuff I had never considered when working with data.

D3 is an amazing piece of technology.

[frasergraham]

Sam Stephenson...

What I discovered is that in many cases, my ability to adapt to a foreign environment without frustration is more important than the benefits of configuring a local environment to suit my whims. And that being able to quickly recreate my environment from scratch is an asset.

It used to take me days to configure a new PC, once I switched over to a Mac it went down to a day. Then the Mac App Store dropped it even further. These days with iCloud, Dropbox and maintaining a minimal deviation from a base installed, I had my new laptop ready to go from clean in a couple hours.

More importantly that setup time is being able to be productive in another user's environment, if you're too acclimatized to your own custom setup then you can be less inclined to sit down and help somebody and more likely to go back to you desk to try and figure it out alone. Working things out together is the best way to build a good team dynamic, don't ruin it with too many custom shortcuts.

[frasergraham]

While individual employees can change their own habits, organizations need strong-willed leaders to make more radical changes. These leaders must thoroughly reform their organization's implicit and explicit reward structure. Are employees praised for coming in on Saturday — even if only to finish work that could have been completed during regular hours? Are employees suspicious of others who leave early for the day in order to watch their child's Little League games?

Of course, this change won't come easily. It's easy to count hours. It's much harder to set project metrics or make subjective evaluations. But smart leaders realize that the only way they can succeed is by getting the most out of their employees. And the only way they can get the best out of their employees is to focus on results, not hours. 

I have long held the belief that we focus on all the wrong things when evaluating our peers or employees. This article touches on all the points I frequently make with others when discussing this topic (although I don't agree with their proposed solution of giving some things less effort). 

Once a company culture has steered into a focus on hours and celebrated the ones who work long hours as their most valued employees, it's hard to shift the culture away from that.

Hours are only one indicator of the value of an employee and not even a good one at that. People should be evaluated based on their value to the company, not the time they spend at their desk.

[frasergraham]

I find myself extremely interested in space for the first time since I was a teenager and it's all because of Elon Musk's vision for the future.

(via Instapaper)

[frasergraham]

because we subscribe to one approach to development that has worked for us, we become closed to other ways of doing things. From that point, decline is inevitable, not only in universal terms, but because technology is such a fast-moving area that stagnation relegates us to the sidelines or confines us to niches

This article focuses on mainframe and Microsoft dev teams but it perfectly captures a core problem in game development, especially with proprietary engines and aging code bases that have lived through many generations.

Staying up to date with modern development methods is hard but necessary to stay relevant.

[frasergraham]

I had the pleasure of meeting Matt Might during one of my visits to the University of Utah recently, after reading this the respect I had for him has increased tenfold.

As a parent of two small children I found his story heartbreaking yet profoundly optimistic, I do not know if I would find the strength for such optimism in the same circumstances, I hope I could. Such trials are a true judge of character.

[frasergraham]

There have been many times in my life when I wish somebody would have said this to me.

The best way to manage complication is to avoid creating it in the first place. If you find yourself in a mindless change → pray → run loop, you don’t understand your code well enough to be editing it. Stop what you’re doing, actually get up and walk away from the keyboard, think about what you’re trying to do, and don’t come back to the keyboard until you understand exactly what you’re doing and how to do it. Obviously there’s some slack here for debugging, but it’s not controversial to say that you shouldn’t change code you don’t understand, even — especially? — when it’s your own.

[frasergraham]

I love the culture at Valve, but it seems to me that you cannot simple move an existing organization into that style of management. You need to start your company with that in mind and hire people who you know will work well in that environment from day one.

(via Instapaper)

[frasergraham]

most people are comfortable being who they are and where they are. It’s us crazy dreamers who are unmoored, and who always seek out secondary worlds

Raph's Website » Is immersion a core game virtue?

[frasergraham]

Having recently moved house, and noticed that five months later there are over a dozen unopened boxes in the store room that I obviously don't need, this article struck home for me in a big way.

(via Instapaper)

[frasergraham]

the now freshly minted manager begins to understand that life as a lead is an endless list of little things that collectively keep you busy, but, in aggregate, don't feel much like progress

More than anything else I have read, this sums up my feelings about the last several years of my working life.

http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2012/02/29/a_precious_hour.html

[frasergraham]

All I want is a world where we can give a game as much time as we’d give a good book. The author should do their best to capture us from the first sentence, of course. But as an audience, I’d like us all to look at the remaining 2.5��� of the book and go not “ugh, stuff”, but “yay, art!”

http://mrgan.tumblr.com/post/17399747880/no-such-thing-as-a-quick-adventure

[frasergraham]

from Marco.org

[frasergraham]

Espresso Field Guide 

via Coffee Nate.

[frasergraham]

from xkcd.com