#UX and #design friends, we need to talk about estimating. I'd like to share some advice that's come up 3 times this week, in hopes it's useful. And it's echoed, by the way, in the BUSINESS OF UX course @EliNatoli and I are teaching at my UX 365 Academy (link at the end).

(1/12)

Avoiding wars with clients is a matter of how you structure your engagements, along with how you spell out what you're doing in your proposals/contracts. That starts with estimating.

The biggest 2 rules I follow are these:

(2/12)

1. I do not EVER estimate a project in full from start-to-finish.

2. Once we're past initial Discovery (see below), I estimate in small chunks, e.g. "here's what will take us to the next iteration/review."

(3/12)

NEVER estimate past the point where you may get new information based on a build/test cycle.

Believe me when I say that you'll be wrong every time. Ask me how I know ;-)

(4/12)

So instead, first, I estimate a Consult/Discovery part that details what I think we need to do to get a handle on what's actually wrong here, and how long that will take.

For example...

(5/12)

Each year, @freedomhouse publishes "Freedom on the Net," an annual snapshot of internet policy and outcomes in different countries, from #netneutrality to internet shutdowns to domestic surveillance.

This year's report is a grim read.

https://t.co/OVoaYjJz5n

1/

The new report, spanning Jun 2019 to May 2020, tracks the steady (pre- and post-pandemic) march to a locked down internet robbed of its liberatory power and perverted in service to control, censorship and

Even before the pandemic, things were bad, but the pandemic accelerates everything: inequality, monopoly, and internet crackdowns. In the name of epidemiology, the world's governments have criminalized some online speech and then arrested journalists and activists.

3/

These speech restrictions also created a simple pretense for national website blocking and site takedowns, used to remove "unfavorable health statistics, corruption allegations, and other Covid-19-related content."

4/

The Chinese model of tech as an autocrat's dashboard and control panel is surging around the world, and exposure notification apps are a powerful accelerant for the model, with mandatory location tracking, call-record harvesting, even mandatory quarantine "selfie checkins."

5/

For decades, Jeff Bezos shunned ads.

But now, Amazon’s ad business is huge: it’s on a $30B+ annual run rate (more than 2x the combined sales of Twitter, Snap and Pinterest).

Here’s how it happened 🧵

1/ Amazon doesn’t break out its ad business separately in financial filings. However, most analyst believe ads make up the majority of its “Other” revenue segment.

This figure has exploded from $1B in 2015 to a current annual run rate of ~$32B.

2/ In 2009, Bezos said “ads are the price you pay for a crappy product”.

But the business is so lucrative that Amazon’s interface has been swamped with ads:

◻️ First 3-7 search results (left in red)
◻️ Most of the product page (right in blue)

3/ Prior to the rise of ads, Amazon set out to build the ultimate organic customer recommendations engine.

The approach was codified in a famed 2003 research paper: “Amazon Recommendations: Item-to-Item Collaborative Filtering.”

4/ In recent years, Amazon organic recommendations:

◻️"Customers who bought this also bought this"
◻️"Customers who viewed also viewed"

Have been replaced w/ ads:

◻️ "Sponsored products related to"
◻️ "Brands related to this category"

Last weekend, I made a threat on the ongoing #SocialMedia shutdown in Uganda and some implications on the future of #internet & Uganda's #digital agenda.

The thread attracted a lot of engagement and questions. Tonight, I will share some final thoughts on the subject. (1)

Conceptually, social media sites are the largest on-boarding platforms for internet users in Uganda. Notably, Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, Instagram & Snapchat attract the highest internet traffic- which drives demand for other platform services e.g Google and Zoom recently.

So- when we talk about an "open internet", we mean the FULL resources of the internet. Any encumberance on selected applications has ripple effects across the entire network thus jeorpadizing standardization of internet/data transmission which is essential for innovation & growth

Furthermore, shutdowns hinder network interoperability (technical ability to plug/link one digital product or service into another product or service). Interoperability is the heart of the "Internet of things" eg business, devices, networks, services, e-govt, integration etc #IoT

Because the internet is a global resource, shutdowns enhance a digital divide (the gap between demographics and regions that have access to modern ICTs, and those that don't or have restricted access). Ironic that 3rd world countries have the highest number of shutdowns globally.

A thread about Eastshade's bike mechanic!

When I originally thought of putting a bicycling in Eastshade, I was pretty sure it wasn't going to work, for the simple fact that if it was easy, we'd see a lot more rideable bikes in games. Well, I was wrong. It took a mere week.

Its essentially a first person controller with extra momentum, resulting in the the movement direction lagging behind your look direction. Then I used the angle between the look and the movement to dictate camera "bank" and handle bar rotation, and voila! Game changing feature!

The look of the bike was harder than the movement. Bicycles are fairly modern, so it was tricky to fit it to the setting. I took some artistic liberties and settled on a penny farthing (but wooden), ignoring how impossible that would be to ride on the rugged terrain in Eastshade.

Surprisingly, the hardest part was sound. It didn't feel like riding a bike until I found the right sounds and how to trigger them. For a while I was stuck thinking too realistically. A penny farthing is fixed gear, pedaling sounds nothing like a regular modern bike.

Finally I abandoned realism and went with sounds normal people would associate with biking. We're all so used to modern bikes that we strongly associate the distinct ticking of a freewheel mechanism (think of the sound when you stop pedaling and coast on a modern bike).

EV Battery overview
Batteries are the key differentiator between the various EV manufacturers. The amount of energy stored in the battery determines the range of the EV, thought to be a major limitation on EV sales.

Consumers tend to worry that an EV with a range of 80 to 250 miles on a single charge would be inconvenient for long trips due to the time it takes to recharge the battery. Commercial batteries need to ensure there is quick recharge and less time between charges

The lithium-ion battery is important because it makes EVs expensive than ICEs. Battery costs per kilowatt-hour (kWh) declined from roughly $1,000 per kWh in 2010 to $227 in 2016

Lithium-ion batteries made up 70 percent of the rechargeable battery market in 2016
BNEF projects that global production capacity for lithium-ion batteries will increase from 103 gigawatt-hours (GWh) in the first quarter of 2017 to 273 GWh by 2021.

The battery manufacturing supply chain has three main parts:

cell manufacturing,

module manufacturing, and

pack assembly.

How to make a "Briefcase" icon in @figmadesign.

🧵 thread 👇

In a 24 x 24 pixel artboard, use the rectangle tool (R) to draw a 18 x 10 pixel rectangle positioned horizontally centered and 6 pixels from the top of the artboard.

Using the ellipse tool (O), draw a 96 x 96 pixel circle and align the top to the center/top of the rectangle. Select both shapes and use the boolean tool to intersect the group.

Using the ellipse tool (O), draw a 48 x 48 pixel circle and align the bottom to the center/bottom of the rectangle. Select both shapes and use the boolean tool to intersect the group.

Flatten the shape (command + E) and double click it to make it editable. Select the top left and right points and give them a 2 pixel corner radius. Select the bottom left and right points and give them a 1 pixel corner radius.

How do you optimise your slides, audio or video when delivering online teaching?

There are many learning theories out there, but Mayer’s Multimedia Learning Theory is epic.

Read this thread + use his theories to improve learning transfer

Non-ideal slide to get started👇

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Ever wondered how the JVM debugger 'Evaluate' feature works in IDEs? Long ago I thought that the Java debug interface (JDI) actually allows you to specify the expression and get back its value.

However, this is not quite possible: there's no Java language compiler inside the JVM. When the process is paused JDI allows you to read or write any variables and fields or even execute an existing method with given arguments. But nothing like addition or multiplication.

On the other hand, #IntelliJIDEA debugger allows you to evaluate even statements! You can write there `for`, `if`, `while`, `switch` - whatever. You can even declare local variables. So how this works?

The answer is simple: IDEA debugger has a built-in interpreter for Java! If you access an existing variable or a field, call a method or instantiate an object, it queries JDI. Otherwise, IDE itself does all the calculations.

The amusing thing is that debugger authors didn't bother to make it as strict as Java itself, so the language inside the interpreter is a much more permissive version of Java. For example, you don't need to initialize variables there! Default values like 0 are used automatically.

LIVE: ❄️ City of Austin leadership including @AustinEnergyGM will address the unprecedented severe weather.
💻 Due to tech limitations, it will only be available via Facebook Live here: https://t.co/PchiwUgP0M
We will be live-tweeting in this thread.

Mayor Steve Adler: This will require us all to come together and help one another.
City Manager Spencer Cronk: As a City, we are doing our best to help those in need.

Cronk: Stay off the roads and conserve energy. Every little bit helps.

COA Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Management Director Juan Ortiz: Currently we have a warming center at the Palmer Events Center. You can show up at any time. As of this morning, cold weather shelters remain active. 282 were sheltered overnight.

Ortiz: Urge residents to conserve much power as possible to help with the emergency issues. We are working with critical facilities to ensure that access to those facilities remain open, so ambulances can get in.

A long time ago I coded up a feature for SocialCoder which converts a link - any link - to a short URL. I use it all the time for sharing links to volunteer profiles and to volunteer opportunity listings.

The feature doesn't care what the link contains, it just hashes the URL, including any query params, and returns a shortened code.

More recently, around Christmas time, I added another feature where I can click a button to send a template notification to a charity that their new listing has been reviewed and published. I call it a next-steps email.

For the past few weeks, its all been working well. Its nice to keep automating things that previously were done by hand.

Fast forward to today.

A new opportunity listing is posted by a charity.

I review and publish it, tweet about it, then click a button to send the charity an emailed notification of next steps.

Are you a Senior Developer & struggling to switch your job?

Here's a thread on how you should prepare before sending out job applications:

🧵👇🏻

First of all know that there's a lot of demand for good software developers.

It's hard for companies to hire good mid level developers. Some of the interviewers I've talked to recently have mentioned this!

So, if you're good, you can always get into a high paying job.

I have 6.5 years of experience mainly as a Backend Developer. Although I do work a bit of front-end tasks as well as part of my current job.

In this thread I'm going to talk about how I would prepare if I was going to apply for a job interview.

As a mid level developer having 4 - 8 years of experience, you will be expected to have certain skills to be hired by companies. Skills like:

- Problem Solving
- HLD
- LLD
- Mentoring / Code reviews
- Taking responsibility
- Leading end-end development & release of projects etc

Problem Solving:

Even though we mostly never write a lot of game changing Algorithms and use data structures, you're still expected to know the most common ones and how to use them to solve problems:

- Tree
- Linked List
- Heap
- Hash Map
- Array etc

I think chrome is intentionally providing shitty user experience for the blocking of HTTP downloads on HTTPS pages, in order to push developers to fix it faster.

you click a HTTP download link on an HTTPS page and what happens? NOTHING. No error page, no pop-up saying "BLOCKED BECAUSE SECURITY", the browser is just like "did you click? I didn't notice"

it just sticks an error in the JS console.

which I'm sure everyone notices

BTW, this is probably going to get fixed soon, but as of Version 87.0.4280.141 (which seems to be latest) there's a bug which lets you bypass the block, most of the time.

Incognito mode.

Basically chrome won't let you download it because it has the context of you clicking it from a HTTPS page.
But it loses the context if you use the "open link in incognito window" option.

So is Apple's anti-theft security a wonderful boon to users?

Or is it just another evil corporation strengthening it's monopoly power?

I had the misfortune of buying a 2018 Mac Mini on ebay a few days ago. Unfortunately, it had not been wiped, and it's security defaults had never been changed.

This essentially turns it into a very shiny paperweight.

And this is where everybody jumps to blame the victim. "But everybody knows you have to make sure the seller wipes the Mac."

My how the corporate overlords have trained us to be their apologists.

To be clear, I'm a software engineer. Part of my job is supporting Mac users. Where I work, people hold on to their computers for several years generally, and the T2 chips are only a couple of years old, so I hadn't run into this situation at work.

Of course, I'd read about them, but I was confident that whatever condition the computer arrived in, I'd likely be able to deal with it.

Unfortunately I hadn't read up enough to be an expert on their T2 chip and Activation lock.

In continuum mechanics, stress is a physical quantity that expresses the internal forces that neighbouring particles of a continuous material exert on each other, while strain is the measure of the deformation of the material.

For example, when a solid vertical bar is supporting an overhead weight, each particle in the bar pushes on the particles immediately below it. When a liquid is in a closed container under pressure, each particle gets pushed against by all the surrounding particles.

The container walls and the pressure-inducing surface (such as a piston) push against them in (Newtonian) reaction.

These macroscopic forces are actually the net result of a very large number of intermolecular forces and collisions between the particles in those molecules. Stress is frequently represented by a lowercase Greek letter sigma (σ).

Residual stresses inside a plastic protractor are revealed by the polarized light.

The old, outdated infiltrated low vibrating 3D system is over. We bring it all down to build a new one. Authorities of prophecies are of divine nature. We're heading in a direction towards conclusion.

It's not too late....

The Cabal has many layers & secretly controls everything on our planet. But, so many on this planet are completely clueless to who they truly are. Humanity is rapidly running out of time to prepare for coming events. The Cabal is a very carefully structured organization,

a hierarchy of non-physical dark matter that feeds off negative energy. This energy has no need for material possessions; only more negative energy which is its life force. 

This energy has consciousness just like non-physical light matter or positive energy which humans

mistakenly refer to as God. Benevolent Galactic beings will teach us in the not too distant future that they consider the God construct mere dogma, superstition for the purpose of control. Love is of the highest frequency, the highest frequency of light which humans interpret as

humans interpret as love & bliss. God is light, extremely high cosmic energy. We are in the process of returning to balance, there must be balance always. We are experiencing this incredible turbulence & chaos on this planet currently because everything is out of balance &