Links from 2021

Project manager, product manager, and program manager. Let’s clear that up. A project manager is responsible for shipping a product, whereas a product manager is responsible for making sure the right product is shipped. A program manager is an uber-mutated combination of both that usually shows up to handle multiple interrelated projects like, say, an operating system. Different companies use the names differently, but for this article, project = ship the product, product = ship the right product, and program = ship many interrelated products, usually at the same time. Got it?

Hydrobloc.

I really enjoy these strategy documents.

I love how this site's retro aesthetic is so different to the cookie-cutter present-day web. Useful info, too.

I did a mix that I think picks up where Journeys By DJ left off. Now the technology is on our desktops, there’s no need to worry about all the technical restrictions we had before. Again we pooled the tracks from several hundred, and using Ableton we could have unlimited tracks and unlimited effects and the ability to warp and tune music, which wasn’t available at the time. I wanted to make something that was as multi-threaded and complex as possible; something that raised the bar again. No one’s really noticed it, but it’s on Mixcloud. [It’s called Coldcut Presents 2 Hours of Sanity Part 1: Love].

Being able to say: “aha, that is an example of oikos common cause” has been enormously illuminating to me. It has never been about populism or nationalism, or right and left; those are just symptoms.

It makes sense that Microsoft and Google (and presumably Amazon) would be very concerned about a world where individual countries make their own laws about what can be put on the Internet, or even seen. Theirs are services predicated on the superior economics that come from centralization; Cloudflare, on the other hand, is already doing all of its computing on the edge — data sovereignty rules are simply a variable. It’s “easy”.

The role of product manager (PM) is often referred to as the “CEO of the product.” I disagree because, as Martin Eriksson points out, “Product managers simply don’t have any direct authority over most of the things needed to make their products successful — from user and data research through design and development to marketing, sales, and support.” PMs are not the CEO of product, and their roles vary widely depending on a number of factors.

One thing that stands up, pretty much whoever you speak to, is the identity of the greatest DJ mix album of all time – that accolade goes to Coldcut’s incredible 70 Minutes Of Madness, their offering for the Journeys By DJ mix series, released in 1995. The wildly inventive mix, which incorporated hip hop, techno, funk and drum & bass (along with the Doctor Who theme tune and a host of crazed spoken word samples), redefined what a DJ mix should be, perfectly capturing the cut & paste ethic of the mid-90s in the process, while arguably inventing what became the pop mash-up.

Lengthy retrospective/interview from 2015 with Jon More, Matt Black, Kev Foakes (aka DJ Food), and Patrick Carpenter aka PC on Coldcut's 70 Minutes Of Madness mix.

Over 42 days during the peak of the first wave of COVID-19 this team worked day and night to produce a fully open-source, privacy-preserving software platform, capable of running open and reproducible analytics across electronic health records, all held securely in situ. Since then the OpenSAFELY platform has expanded to a full scale analytic environment for secure data analysis, reproducible data curation, federated analysis, and code sharing, with every line of code for the platform, for data management, and for data analysis all shared openly by default, in re-usable forms, automatically, and without exception.

The latest big name to follow suit is O2, a telecoms company. The brand is dropping Frutiger, the banal Humanist Sans it has used since 2002, for On Air, a new typeface created by Monotype.

Called the West Kernow Way, the 150-mile route begins and ends in Penzance and is designed to be ridden over three to four days. It will take in many of the highlights of the western half of the Cornish peninsula, including the Botallack tin mines, the Bronze Age monument Mên-an-Tol, Land’s End, St Michael’s Mount and Lizard Point.

In the decaying post-industrial Midwestern city of Detroit, a young Black man by the name of Juan Atkins manifested an escape hatch into the future with the aid of his Korg MS10 synth.

This is not by any means totally down on microservices; some good cautionary tales.

Confidence rides for individuals / families. Learn to ride for children and adults. Women’s only bike maintenance classes.

Through some sort of miracle, my son has chosen to invest the past five years of his free time seeking out astoundingly good YouTube channels, watching most of their back catalogs, and absorbing the contents of almost every episode.

Airbnb alternative.

How to opt-out of FLoC as a web user: Don’t use Google Chrome

“It’s ‘fuck off’ to everything,” says Adam Curtis (pictured below), describing public sentiment today. The British documentarist sees himself as an optimist amid dystopians, and as a classical journalist whose medium happens to be film.

Lengthy interview with Adam Curtis from late 2018.

Some stellar advice here.

There’s really only one key factor that distinguishes enterprise selling from everything a product person knows, and that is enterprise selling ends with the product and starts with the enterprise. Of course that is the complete opposite of what one might normally think where everything starts with a product. Even with the most amazing and inventive product ever conceived, selling at the enterprise level and enterprise scale requires inverting your perspective.

New in the second edition: emoticons and emoji, metrics vs. optical spacing, free fonts, Century Schoolbook alternatives, grids, screen-reading considerations, responsive web design, how to work with a designer, the copyright status of fonts, how this book was made, and typographic humor.

Jobs-to-be-done focus on user problems and needs, while well-executed personas include the same information and also add behavioral and attitudinal details.

CoScreen enables you and your team members to share and edit any app windows simultaneously on your joint workspace. Stop giving up your privacy by sharing your entire screen.

The newly enhanced scope of IR35 is not an end to consultancy-client relationships. However, it has caused confusion and prompted some end-users to become very cautious about using PSC contractors provided by consultancies.

Instead of opening links in the default browser, Choosy sends them to the right browser. Every time.

This actually feels like a very sane use-case for Web Components. Interesting journey from Vanilla JS to raw Web Components to tooling + Web Components.

The difficulty of ensuring that any logo (let alone an intricate, dimensional logo) stands out from the kaleidoscopic eye-candy of ads, apps and open tabs is one driver behind “mobile first” design. Here identity and functionality are conceived from the outset inside the tightest constraints — for what works on a cellphone will surely work on a water-tower.

Such pixel-fixation is table-stakes for modern startups, but legacy brands must be canny when reverse-engineering decades of brand equity into today’s digital Lilliput.

It's very pleasing to have a name and a creditable stab at a rationale for this trend.

Via 💥BLAST!

Not obvious, highly stressful.

A directory of communities for freelancers and small businesses.

Edgar Wright and Dolby Cinema announced that a never-before-seen version of Universal Pictures' 2010 hit cult classic Scott Pilgrim vs. The World will be coming to theaters on April 30. The film has been reimagined in Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos and will play exclusively at Dolby Cinema locations in the U.S. for one week only. "Scott Pilgrim vs. The World was designed for the big screen and for the best sound systems," said Edgar Wright, the film's director, producer, and co-screenwriter. "To be able to see it with the best specs is obviously any filmmaker's dream. You want people to see it as good as it could possibly be. I suspect that if you're a fan of the movie, you're going to get such a kick out of seeing it like this."

Maybe one day this will be shown outside the U.S., too.

An ongoing project to chronicle the history of the internet from a developer perspective.

In retrospect it seems obvious that a relatively low-budget TV show needing stadium crowd shots during a pandemic would make heavy use of VFX.