Sander van Dragt

Really handy reference site for many products. Remember that system provided packages are supported with backported security fixes in most cases. 

So, as a public service, I’m going to list assumptions your systems probably make about names.  All of these assumptions are wrong.  Try to make less of them next time you write a system which touches names.

One of my favourite programming articles of all time.

“Sleep loss will leak down into every nook and cranny of your physiology,” he said. “Sleep, unfortunately, is not an optional lifestyle luxury. Sleep is a nonnegotiable biological necessity. It is your life support system.”

I'm looking forward to reading Matthew Walker's book on the topic.

So that I may never forget where to find this video.

Shahriyar Shahrabi:

In the past few days, I have been experimenting with creating patterns using the particle system in Unity Engine. Here are some of the examples of the shapes I came up with.

Amazing shapes and wallpapers.

Niko Kitsakis on creating well design dialogs:

The text change reflects the fact that you could now have multiple applications open at once. Otherwise it’s not important to our example so let’s focus on the other elements. Two trends are going to become apparent, speed and safety:

The icon with its exclamation mark gives you an immediate idea of the character of the message. “Be cautious” it says, “pay attention.”

Then we have the buttons which no longer say things like “Yes” or “No” but have been changed to verbs which say “Save” and “Don’t Save”. If you glance at those verbs you don’t have to read and understand the text to know what’s going on.

Now look at the new layout of the buttons: Of those three, the first button – Don’t Save – will make you lose data while the other two – Save and Cancel – will save data. In this new layout, the button that will make you lose data stands separated on the left from the two buttons that won’t. This reduces the chance you will accidentally press the wrong option.

Lastly, the most commonly used option – Save – is highlighted and can be activated by pressing the return key on the keyboard.

I consider myself pretty clued up but there are some interesting improvements after reading this article:

1. It contains a list of VPN providers I'll consider when my current subscription expires.
2. Removed the location permission for the Camera app. I had previously installed an app to remove EXIF data.

PagerDuty open-sources its incident response best practices, this is an interesting reference for anyone doing work with an on-call element