Four short links: 28 November 2017
Code for One, Grid Component, Tinder Data, and Engineering Reorg
- Structure — He wrote Structur. He wrote Alpha. He wrote mini-macros galore. Structur lacked an “e” because, in those days, in the Kedit directory eight letters was the maximum he could use in naming a file. In one form or another, some of these things have come along since, but this was 1984 and the future stopped there. Howard, who died in 2005, was the polar opposite of Bill Gates—in outlook as well as income. Howard thought the computer should be adapted to the individual and not the other way around. One size fits one. The programs he wrote for me were molded like clay to my requirements—an appealing approach to anything called an editor. Personalized software is a wonderful luxury. Programmers forget how rare it is. (via Clive Thompson)
- React Data Grid — open source Excel-like grid component built with React.
- What Tinder Knows (Guardian) — the UK laws that let you request this data are wonderful; without it, we’d have little idea how much of our lives we reveal.
- How We Reorganized Instagram’s Engineering Team While Quadrupling Its Size (HBR) — Once we decided to reorg, the first thing we did was determine our desired outcomes as a team. We gathered our leadership in a room and came up with 20 different outcomes—from speed to cost efficiency—and prioritized them, No. 1 to No. 20. We picked our top five outcomes, which became our organizational principles: Minimize dependencies between teams and code; Have clear accountability with the fewest decision-makers; Groups have clear measures; Top-level organizations have roadmaps; Performance, stability, and code quality have owners.
