McFilter

Interesting Things on the Internet: May 22nd 2017

• The Engineer/Manager Pendulum. Great post on the differences between management and being an engineer. Also describes pretty well how my career has gone - especially earlier on. At STNC, I went from engineer to project manager to software manager (probably the equivalent of VP of Engineering now), then dropped back to engineer with sole responsibility for a key product around the time we were acquired by Microsoft, then became team lead as we built up the networking team around that, and was in line to step up the management chain again but the higher management decided to close down the entire product group instead. Hopping between the two has definitely given me better development practices as well as helping my management skills.
• Notes from an emergency, the latest talk from Maciej Ceglowski and it's as on the money about tech, its influence on the world, and what we should be doing, as ever.

Interesting Things on the Internet: May 15th 2017

• Composers as Gardeners: Brian Eno
• The Power of Dabbling: How Hobbies Make Us More Creative.
• Build a Better Monster: Morality, Machine Learning, and Mass Surveillance, Maciej continues to speak the truth about our industry.
• The Ultimate Guide To Being An Introvert.
•  The Rock-Star Appeal of Modern Monetary Theory. 'It follows that currency-issuing governments could (and, depending on how you lean politically, should) spend as much as they need to in order to guarantee full employment and other social goods. MMT’s adherents like to point out that the federal government never “runs out” of money to fund the military, but routinely invokes budget constraints to justify defunding social programs. Money, in other words, isn’t a scarce commodity like silver or gold.' An interesting approach, particularly if you then pair it with...
• ...the idea that universal basic services are more important than income (that's behind the FT paywall, sadly)
• Consultative democracy and how do we combat mass manipulation? A good summary of what's wrong with politics at the moment, from Suw Charman-Anderson.
• WannaCrypt incident report? An excellent suggestion from Russell, about the aftermath of the NHS cybersecurity issue. That concept of building the body of evidence of what's happened, and how it was fixed, is part of why we track our to-do items for DoES Liverpool on an open issue tracker - the Somebody Should list. The information captured in the comments and links between the issues means the closed issues are as important and useful as the open ones.
• OpenTech 2017. Great notes from Kevin Marks condensing the full day of OpenTech into a much shorter read.

Interesting Things on the Internet: May 1st 2017

I tend not to be quite so overtly political with my postings here, or maybe it's not so partisan, but the recent Tories in particular are responsible for making such a mess of the country that it's important to get rid of them at the looming general election.

• What Bullets Do to Bodies. A trauma doctor's view of gunshot wounds and gun control.
• The Case Against Competence. I agree with all of this.
• Shareable graphics for the general election. Much more than that headline indicates.