The surprising thing Google learned about its employees — and what it means for today’s students – Washington Post
I’m not sure about the implications for education mentioned in this article but this is a great summary of Google’s Oxygen and Aristotle projects – where they found that the skills that most highly correlated with successful software engineers were soft interpersonal skills (e.g. being a good coach; listening) and not hard skills like algorithms or data structures. The stereotype of the socially toxic yet brilliant programmer needs to die.
My Internet Mea Culpa – Rick Webb
As a GenX tech worker, this piece struck close to home. Rick Webb says sorry for his tech utopianism (and by implication, the rest of we GenXers who thought that information wanted to be free) that resulted in the terrordrome of awfulness that is today’s web.
The Smart, the Stupid, and the Catastrophically Scary: An Interview with an Anonymous Data Scientist – Logic Magazine
A long anonymous interview with a data scientist, who maintains that data science, machine learning artificial intelligence fields are so full of stupid marketing that close to nobody actually knows what they’re talking about anymore.
China’s Selfie Obsession – New Yorker
An article about beauty, celebrity culture, photo filters and plastic surgery in China.
The Objective-C Runtime & Swift Dynamism – Roy Marmelstein – Realm
A transcript of a 2016 talk. I love deep dives like this into the Objective-C runtime – in particular how simple things like classes are implemented in Objective-C.
An epic treatise on scheduling, bug tracking, and triage – apenwarr
This is a gloriously meandering take on the state of modern software development. It should be required reading for programmers, project managers, and anyone who ever wondered why software is late.
SQL Keys in depth – Joe Nelson
I learnt loads from this article, not just about databases, but about uniqueness and the abstractions we use to represent the real world in our programs.
