Hi there,

Thanks again for signing up. You’re ace!

It’s been an embarrassingly long time since my last email because… well… maybe this will give you an idea:

Here’s the code for that viz.

After 16 moves, nearly 3,000km of driving, and 5 months on the road, we finally found a new place to live. As such, I finally have the energy to write again!

I hope you’ve been well.

Warm wishes,
Di

Design

Melbourne in 2020

Last year I created a timeline visualization to make sense of the nonsense that was 2020. I couldn’t recall the order of certain events, or get a sense of how much time had really passed. In particular, I couldn’t make sense of how long we were trapped in Melbourne (6 months!).

So I recorded all the events that happened to myself and those around me living in Melbourne in 2020. This is just a snippet:

You can see the full timeline in this 2020 timeline notebook on Observable. You can also enter your own events there to make your own timeline.

Steno

In the last few months, I’ve made a bunch of new Typey Type lessons:

• Top verbs
• Two Hanged Women by Henry Handel Richardson: Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson was an Australian author who wrote Two Hanged Women under her pen name, Henry Handel Richardson. She most famously wrote The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, but it’s far too long for a good Typey Type lesson, so you get a short story instead!
• The Man from Snowy River by Banjo Paterson: Andrew Barton “Banjo” Paterson was a bush poet, famous in Australia, even appearing on our $10 note. He also wrote “Waltzing Matilda”, our unofficial national anthem. For this lesson you’ll either want to download the latest Aussie vocab dictionary or treat it as fingerspelling practice when you reach “Kosciuszko”!
• Virginia Woolf’s Monday or Tuesday short stories: “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction”
• Orthography rules to match the Learn Plover lesson on orthography rules
• Stenotypos: This list of tricky words that are easy to slip up on using steno come from a combination of suggestions from Jenny and another community lessons contributor, Jeremy. It is meant to be hard, so you can get fast feedback on the finicky parts of stenography and kick any bad habits you might have with words that are frequently mixed up.
• Cardinal Number Words: contains material like “one thousand”, “one hundred”, and “ninety”.
• Ordinal Number Words: contains material like “thousandth”, “hundredth”, and “ninetieth”.

I’ve also updated Typey Type to let you convert a JSON dictionary to a custom Typey Type lesson.

And here are some other cool things from around the place:

• openstenoproject/awesome-plover: A curated list of awesome plugins and dictionaries for Plover stenography.
• EPLHREU/emily-symbols: A Plover python dictionary allowing for consistent symbol input with specification of attachment and capitalisation in one stroke.
• Steno Dictionaries by Paul Fioravanti, which are meticulously documented.
• Plover Steno on an Ergodox EZ (50 WPM) by Paul Fioravanti on YouTube.

Book review: Radical Candor by Kim Scott

Radical Candor by Kim Scott, revised edition

This is a best-selling management book all about soliciting and giving effective feedback.

I had been forewarned that some of the advice within was antagonistic (“if nobody is ever mad at you, you probably aren’t challenging your team enough”) or bordering on abusive, by pushing people’s boundaries in a questionable effort to bond. It wasn’t quite as bad as I was expecting. I do wonder if that is the difference between the revised edition and the original. It also makes me curious what Scott’s latest book, Just Work, is like.

In any case, I found some interesting nuggets to consider in Radical Candor.

The gist of the book is to be “direct and clear” to achieve radical candor or compassionate candor. Start by explaining the idea to people you work with then ask them to be radically candid with you. “Start by getting feedback, in other words, not by dishing it out.” Then start giving praise before approaching criticism. There are a lot of tangible anecdotes throughout the book that give meaning to Scott’s guidance that make it worth a real read instead of skimming a summary online.

My least favourite thing about the book was the excessive name dropping, but perhaps you’ll find this less irritating than I did.

Overall, take this book’s kind of advice with a grain of salt, and use it to prompt your own reflections on direct and clear feedback.

The difficulty in soliciting criticism from the team I worked with in Japan, however, was enduring the silence. I’ll never forget my first meeting with the AdSense team in Tokyo. My plan was to hold regular meetings with them to ask for suggestions, concerns, improvements. My previous experience in such meetings in other countries had been that if I asked a question like, “What could I do or stop doing that would make your lives better?” and then counted to six in my head, somebody would say something. I counted to ten. Crickets. I asked a different way. Still, crickets. Finally, I told them a story about Toyota that I’d learned in business school. Wanting to combat the cultural taboos against criticizing management, Toyota’s leaders painted a big red square on the assembly line floor. New employees had to stand in it at the end of their first week, and they were not allowed to leave until they had criticized at least three things on the line. The continual improvement this practice spawned was part of Toyota’s success. I asked my team what they thought: did we need a red box? They laughed, and, fearing I might just paint a red box somewhere, somebody opened up just a tiny bit. It wasn’t much, frankly—a complaint about the tea in the office—but I rewarded the candor handsomely. I thanked the person publicly, I sent a handwritten note, I approved funds to make sure there was better tea, and I made sure everyone knew that there was better tea now because somebody had complained about it in the meeting. Later, more substantive issues got raised.

Dev links

I’ve recently been gathering humourous, delightful, or rude ways to teach tech things to people. Here are some of my favourites:

• Gently down the steam by Mitch Seymour
• Cassidoo’s next-prankz
• What is ARIA even for?
• Should I use MySQL?
• Should I use a Carousel?
• The Best Motherfucking Website:
• ModalzModalzModalz
• Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo
• SXSW Keynote - “You Know What? Fuck Dropdowns”
• Terms and Conditions Game
• Can’t unsee

Can you think of some more? Email me to let me know, I’d love to grow this list!

Winning at learning

I’ve been working with a design tech team recently on developing personalised learning plans and pulled together some greatest hits on learning how to learn:

• Summary of First 20 Hours by Josh Kaufman
• The Beginner’s Guide to Deliberate Practice by James Clear
• Inversion by James Clear
• How to Deconstruct Any Skill You Want to Learn Faster with Tim Ferriss tips
• Wikipedia: Spaced repetition
• Wikipedia: Forgetting curve
• Wikipedia: Practice
• Efficiency is the Enemy
• Deep learning strategies
• How to Learn Any Language in 3 Months
• Learning to Learn by Sarah Drasner for developers
• Developing UX teams

What’s your favourite tactic for learning efficiently? Email me to let me know.