Four short links: 18 November 2019
High Modernists, GitLab Runbooks, Wrist Exercises, and a Tiny Dynamicland
- The Efficiency-Destroying Magic of Tidying Up (Florent Crivello) — In his seminal book “Seeing Like a State,” James Scott describes what he calls “high modernists”: lovers of orders who mistake complexity for chaos, and rush to rearrange it from the ground up in a more centralized, orderly fashion. Scott argues that high modernists end up optimizing for a system’s legibility from their perspective, at the expense of its performance from that of the user. This insight is magic. Florent takes it good places.
- Runbooks — GitLab’s runbooks.
- Hand-Wrist Exercises for Computer Users — even if you don’t use these exercises, every computer professional should know the physiology and care of their wrists and hands. If you mentor young people in the industry, teach them this.
- Tinyland — a very, very small Dynamicland.
