Links from 2023

👋 Hi, this is Gergely with the monthly, free issue of the Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter. In every issue, I cover challenges at Big Tech and startups through the…

EA’s god’s eye image of moral reflection constrains how we can conceive of ethical thought and practice, leaving no room for views intolerant of the idea that…

Now, after seeing [Scrum] from an adjacent (but not subjugated under it) perspective, I think it is a life-sucking batch of meetings that are good for one thing: taking developers who can’t or don’t want to see the overall business/architecture picture and getting useful work out of them.

The intellectual movement that calls itself longtermism is an outgrowth of Effective Altruism (EA), a utilitarianism-inspired philanthropic programme founded…

Have you been in any of these situations? Managers make decisions that’s out of their leagues and everyone else in the team ends up paying for it. Knowledgeable…

This is based on an internal quip doc I wrote up about careful communication in the context of rebuilding trust. I got a couple requests to turn it into a blog…

I was five or six, growing up in London, when the first strange episode occurred. Waiting to fall asleep, I suddenly felt as if my bed was enormous and I was…

The revolutionary ideas that empowered the Web A simpler approach to building applications on the Web and beyond with htmx and Hyperview Enhancing web…

There’s a simple joy in the snap of leafy greens or the crunch of raw carrots fresh from the store. But keeping those perishables perky once you get them home…

One morning in August 2021, as she had nearly every morning for about a decade, Janice Smith opened her computer and went to Kiva.org, the website of the San…

The age of the record label as a buzzy, zeitgeist-shifting epicentre is practically over. Which is what makes PC Music, a label set up by producer A. G. Cook in 2013, such a unique entity. As it announces that after ten years of operating it will cease to release any new music, it leaves behind a legacy that is almost unparalleled in contemporary music.

The experience of travelling in Japan is simultaneously overwhelming and freeing. The world feels bigger out there, gilded by how mainstream video game culture…

Metamodernism is a term that has gained traction in recent years as a means of articulating developments in contemporary culture, which, it is argued (and our…

London and the UK need to drive innovation to solve the challenges of our time. (Jonathan Brady/PA) PA Archive 28 July 2023 A little over 150 years ago, the…

Baconing.

From ambiguous recycling symbols to the lack of infrastructure to deal with soft plastics and the rise in vapes and used nappies entering recycling centres, the…

Distant profits are worth less and less these days Sep 15th 2022 This article is part of our Summer reads series. Visit the full collection for book lists,…

Today's links Autoenshittification: How the computer killed capitalism. This day in history: 2003, 2008, 2013, 2018 Colophon: Recent publications,…

Like many breakthroughs in scientific discovery, the one that spurred an artificial intelligence revolution came from a moment of serendipity. In early 2017,…

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the U.N. released its annual State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report last week.  Its conclusions are sobering. Global hunger is still far above pre-pandemic levels.

Choosing the less-efficient way of doing something, especially things we do for pleasure, can help us reassess our relationship with time and forgo the constant need for productivity.

Scientific evidence for popular health supplements

A large-scale, public access walkability index that assigns a numerical walkability score to any address in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia.

By treating some digital services as public infrastructure, countries from tiny Estonia to giants such as India and Brazil are reimagining what sovereignty and state capacity could look like in a world of bits and bytes.

In a recent McKinsey survey, they say, about 90% of companies had some kind of digital strategy, but they captured less than a third of the revenue gains they had anticipated. Moreover, the success rate is more uneven within industries than it is between them. The best retailer may be more digitally productive than an average high-tech firm, and the worst retailer may be as bad as the worst government entity.

I think the 3 absolute demons that will eventually seek to destroy you in any homebrewn GUI framework will eventually be:

- Rendering and dealing with text in all of its extreme permutation. Styling. Localization. Character sets. Etc.

- Modern accessibility standards. There are countless annoying yet de facto UX patterns that are just nightmarish to check off the list from scratch. Inputs/forms/etc. Even worse than accessibility, because you can decide to forgo that completely if you really wanted. The sheer volume of UX use cases and edge cases involved in even seemingly basic input components is also an exercise in rote dread. You've got input validation, error states, just so many ergonomics to deal with.

- Fluid layouts and scaffolding. This is where modern HTML/CSS finally starts to shine because making flexible layouts is actually quite painless. But it's a motherfucker to roll your own approach.

Almost too in-depth.

An open source game about learning Git

DevOps started as a well-intentioned set of practices and culture. Over the years, it has devolved into an unholy beast of division and tunnel vision.

The most important thing that Apple announced this week was not actually that Vision Pro, even if it is what has grabbed the headlines and will decide Apple’s future. Instead, it is the software and operating system that underpins it, and which could be around for much longer than the headset itself.

If Apple’s vision wins out, the fear is that we’ll all sink into our cypberpunk home theater goggles, consuming content as the world burns — it’s almost enough to make you wish for the metaverse.

Spicy.

Users need open source projects, but open source projects do not need users. That asymmetry is, I believe, at the crux of the open source sustainability.

As the amount of UPF we eat rises, so do rates of cancer and diabetes. Riddled with additives that are crammed into tiny print on the sides of packs, such food constitutes 57% of Britons’ energy intake. This is the highest in Europe, comparing with 14% in France and 13% in Italy. Being overweight or obese affects 63% of adults in England, among the highest percentage in Europe. There now appears to be incontrovertible evidence that such a diet heightens the risk not just of diabetes and cancer but cardiovascular disease and dementia.