Weekly Roundup - Issue #8

It’s moving week! The weekend was spent packing up some parts of the house, the ones that we do not trust the movers and packers with anymore. This is my fifth move within Bangalore since I first moved here to join NID in 2012 and hopefully the last for a bit.

We need to talk about your Q3 roadmap – Lara Hogan

As people complete their vaccination schedule, as the world around us continues to burn, and as the product roadmap chugs along, something’s gotta give. And I think it’s going to be your feature plans—because the humans behind them need time to recuperate.

larahogan.me

I’ve seen a lot of departures happening this year with most folks not knowing what’s next and taking a break to figure things out. With a few more looming around the corner, I thought of re-visiting this post prophesizing why this is happening.

Your Work is Starstuff

How the distinct ache of lost work is part of a larger story

joelcalifa.com

It’s mid-year review season, and I just wrapped up my ratings for this cycle today. Two key projects that we worked on this year got killed while a few others got delayed for reasons outside the scope of the team. Joel tries to look at the positive side of such incidents, about how even though these projects fail, they are but small steps in the larger scheme of things. At a personal level, I agree with him but not at a professional level. Impact and Visibility are often(wrongly) the levers for a designer’s growth within an org. As I pointed out on this tweet, a designer has no control over either and their journey up the ladder will be slower. Studies have shown that this is especially true for women and people of color. So stop thinking that you will be rewarded if you do good work. No, you need to fight for that reward.

Related:

Intercom recognized this issue and is attempting to solve it with their new job levels: https://www.intercom.com/blog/product-design-job-levels/

The Future of Work at Cloudflare

Prior to the start of the pandemic, Cloudflare was very much a work-from-office culture. And so when, on March 13, 2020, we closed all our offices and asked everyone to work from home, the two of us were extremely nervous.

And then something unexpected happened: a lot of things got better.

blog.cloudflare.com

A thoughtful piece on the ‘Future of work’. A lot of interesting ideas in there. Glad to see companies including remote in their workplace’s future.

The vanishing designer – Chuánqí Sun

Visionary designers have lost their conceptual integrity to an industrial complex optimized for consensus, predictability, and short-term business gain.

uxdesign.cc

Every few months, there comes along a post that’s so profound that it resonates with a lot of folks. This was such a post. Do yourself a favour and read it.

Coding with Character – Doug Wilson

If you spend all day looking at code, letters, and characters—why not make it fun?

realdougwilson.com

This one is an ode to monospaced fonts and Doug provides a list of his favourite monospaced fonts. I have never needed to choose a monospaced font and I never knew that there were so many. I also learnt that a few of those like Operator Mono, Dico Code and Cartograph have cursive influenced italics. That’s pretty cool.

Why does man print "gimme gimme gimme" at 00:30?

We’ve noticed that some of our automatic tests fail when they run at 00:30 but work fine the rest of the day. They fail with the message gimme gimme gimme

in stderr, which wasn’t expected. Why are…

unix.stackexchange.com

I’ll end this issue with this post which surfaced on my timeline after 3 years and was fun to read again.