“Radical Candor” is one of those phrases that I’ve heard and wondered about. Is it another vacuous management phrase? Does it mean anything? I saw it in the library and thought I’d find out. I’m cynical about these things but it doesn’t mean I’m closed minded!
The pitch is “Be a kick-ass boss without losing your humanity” which sounds positive but I don’t manage people at work. Even if it contained genuine insight, would there be anything I could use?
How does switching email hosts disable your Bluetooth headphones? Read on to find out.
As many people did recently, I got The Email from Google telling me that my Apps for Domains (Legacy) account is going away and that I should either pay up or move away.
I’m not averse to paying. I use email a lot and I have my own domain, so I appreciate that I’m not a typical consumer. But I do object to paying Google because it feels like they’re double-dipping: both data mining my information and billing me for the service1.
A couple of years ago I did a conference talk called “On Cloud Nine: How to be happy migrating your in-memory computing platform to the cloud.” I wish I’d had “Cloud Without Compromise” back then. It covers much of the same ground but, as you’d expect in a book rather than a forty minute conference talk, in much greater depth. More importantly, it puts some concepts into context much more clearly that I did, either by explaining it better or by giving it a good name.
I failed to reach my target of reading twelve books in 2021 by quite some margin this year. I finished only ten books, and that’s including the cheat of counting two short stories as two books!
Despite my objective of reading more fiction, I also failed with that (just the one novel and the two short stories).
While the volume was down both on previous years and my target, the quality was actually pretty good. From the story of the company behind the BlackBerry to the story of the Seventies, how to build a computer and how computers were made. All were worth a read.
In one sense this was me trying to cheat my “twelve books in 2021” challenge. Does reading two short stories count as two books? Goodreads seems to think so…
But it wasn’t just a cheat. These are still stories that I did want to read. Dan Moren is a writer I’ve followed for a while, though entirely in his Mac-centric, technical writing at Six Colors1 and podcasting at Clockwise. The stories are both part of a bigger sci-fi-space-opera universe but work well stand-alone.
I have a confession to make. I had a BlackBerry for a few months and I hated it. To be fair I was late to the party. By the time I used one, the iPhone had launched and and the BlackBerry was not the Cool Thing any more.
Nevertheless, a few years before that I remember seeing them all the time around the City and Canary Wharf. They had an impressive tactile quality, where were people continually touching them, scrolling the side-wheel or the spinning the little trackball on the later models. By the time I started using one, the hardware itself was still great but the software was incredibly dated.
Empty shops, rising prices, the laughing stock of Europe, our place in the world in question, people out of work and fuel shortages. But that’s enough about late 2021, I decided that I wanted to learn more about the Seventies, the decade that brought, well, me, the Winter of Discontent, power cuts, the three day week and shocking fashion sense. There are a few books that cover the same timeline, but I decided on “Crisis? What Crisis?” [affiliate link] by Alwyn W. Turner.
I made the mistake of suggesting that there was a blog to be made from this tweet. This is that post.
People still underestimate the value in (Developer|Operator) Experience when building platforms and honestly it’s kinda shocking to me.
If you want to win mindshare you need to make your tools actually usable. If you don’t want to lose it you need the same.
First: I agree with the sentiment. Maybe not to the same extent as Danielle, but I fight the same battles in my day job. I wanted to say this now because, on reading the rest, you may think the opposite. What follows is an explanation of why this is a common situation. I don’t mean it as a justification.
While there is nothing wrong with “The Little Book of Humanism” [affiliate link], it wasn’t for me. Some people need to see aphorisms or testimony about their chosen faith. If that’s you, if you’re a humanist, then this book fits the bill. Similarly, if you’re Humanism-curious, then this book might fill in some gaps in your knowledge.
None of the sections span more than a few pages and it’s filled with quotes and stories by people who were publicly Humanist or at least espoused the same values. The vignettes cover life from birth to death and everything in between. Some I’d heard of before, others were new to me. It’s longer than I was expecting, though it’s easy to dip in and out; there’s no need to read the whole thing beginning to end.
While I have more than enough books on my “to read” list, I am always up for suggestions. “Code” [affiliate link] came up in a Twitter conversations about computer hardware. I noted that one of my favourite courses from my Computer Science degree (in hindsight if not at the time) was where we went from “What is electricity?” right up to a pretty much fully working CPU. “Code” was recommended as it covers the same ground.