Welcome to my PinkLetter. A short, weekly, technology-agnostic, and pink newsletter where we cultivate timeless skills in web development.
My Ramblings This Week
What do you do?
If the first answer that comes to mind is the title of your day job, then ask yourself:
What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of what you do?
If you don’t have the answer, don’t worry. It’s a question I’ve been pondering for weeks about myself and I still don’t have a legit answer. It makes me angry and frustrated.
It’s so hard to state what value you provide that most agencies cover it up with bullshit business jargon. Here are three completely random H1s for “web development agency”—I swear it’s the first three I opened:
- “We are a one-stop digital agency that merges exceptional design with state-of-art technology. Our team strategizes, designs, and develops custom websites and web applications for businesses around the world. We approach projects as proactive business consultants, constantly providing feedback and focus to drive success.”
- “Web Development. 25 years of experience in custom web development.”
- “Perceiving. Endeavouring. Delivering. the dots and pixels of all your digital needs.”
Ever heard of somebody who:
- merges shitty design and old technology
- has no experience
- doesn’t deliver
Of course not! And that’s why those positioning are as good as a lorem ipsum.
Tell me what you can do for me, not how cool you are.
So.. what do you do?
Elsewhere on the Web
IT Burnout Index by Yerbo
With the IT Burnout Index you can measure your own burnout risk levels at the present time, see the detailed result for each of the four burnout factors considered
(Riccardo: I got 4.6/6. Not good.)
José Valim, creator of Elixir and form Rails core contributor by Remote Ruby
Today, our discussions take us through José’s background, being a Rails core member, and the story of how he created Elixir. He also goes in depth about LiveView, distributed systems, how using Elixir and Phoenix is a great developer experience, new and exciting things he’s working on with Elixir, and he fills us in on Nerves, FarmBot, Broadway, and Numerical Elixir. Go ahead and download this episode now to find out more!
(Riccardo: I want to redo all my Rails years in Phoenix.)
Understanding the bin, sbin, usr/bin , usr/sbin split by Rob Landley
When the operating system grew too big to fit on the first RK05 disk pack (their root filesystem) they let it leak into the second one, which is where all the user home directories lived (which is why the mount was called /usr). They replicated all the OS directories under there (/bin, /sbin, /lib, /tmp…) and wrote files to those new directories because their original disk was out of space.
(Riccardo: Nothing better than one of those pure-html–mailing-list emails.)