Welcome to my PinkLetter. A short, weekly, technology-agnostic, and pink newsletter where we cultivate timeless skills about web development.
My Ramblings This Week
In the last PinkLetter, I bragged about iterating aggressively on a legacy codebase without shipping a broken product.
Guess what happened this week? Boom!
I made a mistake that slipped through our testing, and a trial user got stuck in it. Even worse, it happened at the same time we sent them an invoice to become a paid customer.
I could have called it a bug, but I’ve stopped using the b-word. I took ownership instead.
I fixed the code, sent my apologies to the client, together with an explanation of the problem, and compiled a post mortem.
The client hasn’t yet paid the invoice, and I still feel guilty for making such a stupid mistake. Still, this is the only major incident we had in almost one year. I call it a success.
You can find more about being wrong and taking ownership in It’s Called Mistake, Not Bug.
Elsewhere on the Web
Spying on your programs with strace by Julia Evans
strace is my favorite program. I think that it doesn’t get enough attention from programmers, so I wrote a zine about it to teach more people about how to use it.
(Riccardo: On Mac take a look at dtruss.)
Emoji under the hood by Tonsky
For the past few weeks, I’ve been implementing emoji support for Skija. I thought it might be fun sharing a few nitty-gritty details of how this “biggest innovation in human communication since the invention of the letter 🅰️” works under the hood.
(Riccardo: 🤘⚠️)
Bourdieu’s social theory applied to tech by Romeu Moura
Obscure though it may seems, the sociologist Bourdieu and his social theory tell us a lot about what is happening in the workplace and society around us. By understanding what he meant by “symbolic violence”, “cultural capital” “hexis” etc, we see how each of us influences and is influenced by the people around us, in ways that we wouldn’t expect. From this talk, a vulgarized and easy to understand version of Bourdieu’s ideas, each of us can seek how to improve the ambience immediately around us.
(Riccardo: Eye-opening on so many levels.)