Blogs

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.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/microsoft-teams-stores-auth-tokens-as-cleartext-in-windows-linux-macs/


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.

https://nextcity.org/urbanist-news/bikes-not-self-driving-cars-are-the-technological-gateway-to-progress


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!