How are we all doing today and what do we each have on our agendas for the day today?
Work stuff as always here. Thankfully things are slowing down after the major Nova release last week so that's good. Couple of meetings today from 12pm - 3pm EST.
After that, might give Gray Zone Warfare a try as the wife and I have been debating on picking it up.
This is a retropost. Written contemporaneously in 2020, but published four years after the events. It's May 2020 as I write this. I'm typing to capture the moment. Right now, I've no idea what the impact is. This is the exact moment, on Thursday May 7th, I hit the Big Red Button - three of […]
This is a retropost. Written contemporaneously in 2020, but published four years after the events.
It's May 2020 as I write this. I'm typing to capture the moment. Right now, I've no idea what the impact is.
This is the exact moment, on Thursday May 7th, I hit the Big Red Button - three of them! - to open source the UK's COVID-19 Beta test app.
It was thrilling and terrifying. We'd spent the last few weeks getting ready to open source the repos and then, at the last minute, it all went wrong. The plan was to launch on Tuesday - but fate conspired against us.
The problems fell into three main areas:
Threats and personal safety. This was probably the highest profile code release that we'd ever done. There were already people grumbling online that the people writing the code were "traitors". Did we want to expose our people to that sort of personal abuse? What if they were targets of phishing attempts?
Redacting history. Probably the most contentious issue. We all wanted to release everything from the very first commit. Would that reveal anything dangerous? Had someone slipped and accidentally committed an API key they shouldn't?
Communications. The other most contentious issue! The department were in "crisis comms" mode. Everything was delayed. No one had reviewed the blog I'd written, there was no pre-arranged plan in place for this sort of thing. Understandable really - this was a tiny piece of a much larger puzzle. But it was still frustrating to wait for people to be ready for us to publish.
We took the pragmatic approach. We took a snapshot of the code, thoroughly scrubbed it of all identifying information and secrets, and prepared to release it. Then we waited. And waited.
Every time we thought we had the go-ahead, there was another delay! There was a strict comms schedule. We couldn't launch now; it would interrupt that other announcement!
I was asked to help rewrite bits of the announcements. This led to some memorable questions from the comms squad. How can you explain to the average user...
what "Source Code" is?
why the Android code is different from the iPhone code?
who are "Git Hub"?
And, the kicker? All these questions came in while I was on a conference call with a bunch of government ministers! The joys of multiple monitors!
It was interminable. I sent texts which went unanswered. Emails. Phone calls. Just a few minutes more. Any moment now. We need to wait for...
And then!
"Can we launch ASAP?"
Yes! The email I was waiting for. But I am a paranoid and cautious Fraggle. Was that "Launch now!" or "Can we launch now?"?
So I sent a reply. "Just to confirm - do you want me to publish now?" And waited.
And waited.
I got an email from my boss "Launch now!"
And a second later, from comms: "Please hold off - no go. Will call you shortly."
How I longed to press that button. I could say that I only saw the first email... No. Maybe. No.
An eternity. During which time I casually glanced at Twitter and read all the angry messages from people demanding the release of the code.
The call came. "Publish it - but don't tell anyone." Weird flex, but OK.
I called my very-patient wife into my home office. I wanted the moment captured. She opened her camera. A few clicks, and it was done.
— Terence Eden is on Mastodon (@edent) May 7, 2020
I did a little dance. Let all of the tension out of my body. And waited for the hate to roll in.
It didn't. The response was... positive! Yes, there were grumbles, but so many people were fulsome in their praise that it was overwhelming. Congratulatory tweets and emails did the rounds, and I had a nice cold ale.
I took the bank holiday weekend off. Well, I obsessively read all the tweets, answered questions about my blog post, and kept half-an-eye on GitHub. I'm not good at relaxing.
Has it worked? Did we make the NHS more open and transparent? Did open source win the day? Did the beta test work? Were lives saved? Or was it a damp squib?
As I write this, we're still in the eye of the storm. Perhaps, when this post is published, we'll know the answers.
In Japan, 30% of employees resign from their first jobs. But at Inaba Foods, they're setting new records for attrition. Why were conditions so bad there that 90% of new employees left within weeks?
"A lot of companies are just big piles of possums running around and biting each other. Maybe they don't start out that way, but sooner or later they hire a biting possum, and the other possums bite back, and pretty soon whenever a new possum joins holy shit there are all these possums biting me."
#Europe#USA#Work#WorkingHours#QualityOfLife: "In short, most Americans would probably prefer European working hours. It is just that their employers, and the cost of health insurance, get in the way. The US offers big prizes for finishing top, and big punishments for finishing bottom. That is partly why Europe exports its most ambitious strivers there.
But few Americans win the big prizes. Many others end up overworked and unhappy, albeit in big houses and cars. In the latest World Happiness Report — a partnership between Gallup, the Oxford Wellbeing Research Centre and the UN — the US finished 23rd for self-reported happiness. Nordic countries took the top spots. As the Swedish political scientist Bo Rothstein observed: “It is now clear that, from the many societal models that have been tried since the breakthrough of industrialism, social research can point to a winner in terms of human wellbeing and this is the Nordic model.”
Even Tangen seems to like it. He has taken enough leisure time to build up the world’s largest collection of Nordic modernist art (the sort of activity the typical New York hedge-funder would not do alone), and enjoys holidays in his summerhouse."
Stylized, isometric 3D illustration for the Dutch FNV Bouw magazine, about meetings.
Back in the mid-2000s, my style experiments were converging to a minimalistic semi-voxel style avant la lettre, years before the introduction of Minecraft. Not to boast BTW, just a fun fact. 🙂
I try now #Logseq and this is #OpenSource and I would like to like it but somewhere I can't manage to understand and use it. I don't just want to write down my thoughts and #ideas, I also want to be able to check off a #todo list… 😐
"Start small. Don't try to build a system overnight. Doing so will make both adopting the tool harder and take you down a rabbithole of customisations you don't need."
Good morning and happy Wednesday to the #Fediverse today!
It's a new day, so let's all discuss what the day has in store for each of us.
For me, it's just the usual work stuff. It's super busy today and will be for the next several days due to us releasing Nova 8.0.16 to the stable channel with a 30% staged roll out. Lots of emails coming in.
Fortnite with friends tonight and not much else beyond that.
Many companies are pushing employees to return to the office. But what's the environmental impact?
@grist explores the question: "Recent data suggest that remote work could speed along companies’ plans to zero out their carbon emissions, but businesses don’t seem to be considering climate change in their decisions about the future of office work."
Other professors used to take me to snacks when I was single, so I was well aware that hostesses were mostly divorced or single mothers. Mimi sheds light on the nature of snacks by saying that #Japan has a dark side. Regarding the #social#inequality that Greg mentions, Mimi clarifies that there is a double standard whereby men can go to snacks openly, but it is shameful for #women to work in them. Now I'm a family man, but I sympathize with such women, who would otherwise have to #work for close to the minimum wage.
A documentary succeeds insofar as it sheds light on the topic. If you watch it, perhaps let us know your impressions.