On his way to be sworn in as the most powerful man in the world, Franklin Delano Roosevelt had to be lifted out of his car and carried up the stairs. Frances Perkins, who campaigned with Roosevelt and
Everything you do—walking to your yoga class, making your favorite latte order, talking to your bestie, and just getting through the workday—happens thanks to your brain. Your brain is the control cen
If you’ve ever spoken to someone and later felt that you would have better spent your time talking to a brick wall, you’ll surely identify with the observations of Rebecca West. “There is no such thin
Correction: Throughout this article, I attribute Chapter 2 of Clean Code to Robert Martin, however I was recently informed that this particular chapter was actually authored by Tim Ottinger. That said
The first antibiotics ushered in a medical revolution a century ago, saving millions of lives every year from deadly infections and allowing doctors to safely perform many medical procedures we now ta
MongoDB has a nice leadership development program internally. They suggested that filling/sharing this questionnaire would be useful to get you acquainted with the people you work with daily. I am not
One of the harder situations you might find yourself in is managing a bottleneck team. What is a bottleneck team? When other teams can’t get their work done unless you do something for them, you’re a
Do “outline speedrunning”: Recursively outline an MVP, speedrun filling it in, and only then go back and perfect. This is a ~10x speed up over the ‘loading-bar’ style (more on that below) Don’t just r
The breaking tech news this year has been the pervasive spread of "AI" (or rather, statistical modeling based on hidden layer neural networks) into everything. It's the latest hype bubble now that Cry
For more than a decade, American parents have been trying to be more like the French. Journalist Pamela Druckerman kicked off the trend with the 2012 bestseller Bringing Up Bébé, in which she painted
« Home / Posts 2023-03-18 Every company has, or develops, a hierarchical reporting structure over time. It's normal. A common mistake I see is allowing the communication structure to mirror the report
Each of us will clock roughly 84,365 hours at work in our lifetime. But for 1 in 3 of us, those working hours are not happy ones. Fortunately, many leaders are waking up to the fact that solving the c
Status games 27th May 2024 There's a fascinating chapter in Keith Johnstone's Impro, called Status. The context is improvisational theatre but it contains some real wisdom about life in general. I've
Familiarity enables the transfer of experience between similar products or services, allowing us to be productive without first learning how a system works. When we encounter familiar interface patter
I'd like to refresh everyone on the importance of our weekly and daily check-ins. We all know the simple purpose of check-ins – they replace status check meetings, create room for distraction-free day
Even if you are a diehard morning person, waking yourself up in the a.m. can be quite a challenge. And it’s not just you. There is a phenomenon called sleep inertia that refers to the brain fog and sluggishness that occurs after waking up from sleep. Even when you do manage to get up and going, that…
“Our focus with AI is to help create more healthy and equitable relationships.” Whitney Wolfe Herd, the founder and executive chair of the dating app Bumble, leans in toward her Bloomberg Live intervi
As discussed in Components of engineering strategy, a complete engineering strategy has five components: explore, diagnose, refine (map & model), policy, and operation. However, it’s actually quite ch
If you’re looking to understand the philosophy that underpins Silicon Valley’s latest gold rush, look no further than OpenAI’s Scarlett Johansson debacle. The story, according to Johansson’s lawyers,
The term ‘open source’ started in software development, but it is applicable to anything. If a thing is open source, first and foremost it means you have access to its source code — what makes that th
When you are working in any sort of leadership role, you'll have to get people to work toward initiatives that you're leading or make changes you're proposing. Whether you're a line manager running a
Mattermost uses Elasticsearch in large deployments to reduce the stress the database suffers when running search queries while returning even better, fine-tuned results. For this to work, Elasticsearc
In my experience, a key skill to develop is the ability to separate one thing from another. To prevent the small from becoming the all. Take a policy, for example. Could be a government, or a school,
In another case, a useful, unofficial Home Assistant tool for Mazda vehicle owners, developed from traffic watching, was wiped out in 2023 when its mostly sole developer received legal notices and DMC
As a dog walker in Southern California, Rubén Arteaga spends a lot of time outside — at nearby parks, the beach, and on mountain trails. Yet with all his attention on the dogs and his mileage tracker,
Alternating Style Queries With the container style queries on the horizon, it is a good time to do more experiments with them. In one of my recent experiments, I found out that style queries will allo
I. The smartest person I’ve ever known had a habit that, as a teenager, I found striking. After he’d prove a theorem, or solve a problem, he’d go back and continue thinking about the problem and try t
Management advice often includes guidance on managing low performance. There is less written about managing high performance. This disparity exists for two reasons: High performance is less common tha
Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Charley Gallay/Getty Images for Netflix. Remember Bizarro Jerry? In the eighth season of Seinfeld, when the ubiquitous, insanely popular sitcom was edging away fr
As someone who takes plenty of notes, I’m always on the lookout for tools and strategies that can help me to refine my own note-taking process (such as the Cornell Method). And while I generally prefe
This story was funded by our members. Join Longreads and help us to support more writers. Leyton Cassidy | Longreads | May 7, 2024 | 5,821 words There is a moment—an imperceptibly fast one—when a huma
Part I : Serious Play Part II : The Future of Design Tools Part III : The World's Most Satisfying Checkbox Part IV : The Sound of Software Repetitive. Disruptive. Annoying. Sound is an outcast in So
In her book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, psychologist Susan Cain talked about the “Extrovert Ideal” when it comes to people’s confidence. It’s the widespread beli
4 min read· Jan 29, 2024 10 JavaScript Hacks You Need to Know Right Now (Before Your Peers Do!) JavaScript is a versatile and powerful programming language that has become an indispensable tool for we
Spicing up text with text-emphasis in CSS March 24, 2024 · CSS There are a lot of ways to style text in CSS. You can change the color, size, font, and even add effects like shadows and outlines. But r
Six years ago I celebrated my 68th birthday by gifting my children 68 bits of advice I wished I had gotten when I was their age. Every birthday after that I added more bits of advice for them until I
Polish is a word that gets thrown out in conversations about craft, quality, and beauty. We talk about it at the end of the design process, before the work goes out the door: let’s polish this up. Let
Recently, psychologist Maytal Eyal has observed what she calls an “epidemic of self-hatred.” Both within her work as a therapist and in her wider community, Eyal noticed how the weight of self-critici
I often wonder: what is really the job of leadership in a company? I find it helpful to use different lenses to try and answer that question. To borrow from physics, potential energy is the stored ene
In his book On War, Clausewitz defines friction as the difference between military theory and reality: Thus, then, in strategy everything is very simple, but not on that account very easy. Everything