Mark Nicol

@mark_nicol
92 Followers
226 Following
721 Posts
East Lothian dad. Likes bad jokes. Mostly tired but optimistic. Would like to write more code and better docs.
PronounsHe/Him They/Them
Githubhttps://github.com/mark-nicol

This satirical blog post really illustrates the problem with a lot of technical writing. Amazing technical writing is so good and then everything else reads like this

https://anniemueller.com/posts/how-i-a-non-developer-read-the-tutorial-you-a-developer-wrote-for-me-a-beginner

How I, a non-developer, read the tutorial you, a developer, wrote for me, a beginner - annie's blog

“Hello! I am a developer. Here is my relevant experience: I code in Hoobijag and sometimes jabbernocks and of course ABCDE++++ (but never ABCDE+/^+ are you kidding? ha!)  and I like working with Shoobababoo and occasionally kleptomitrons. I’ve gotten to work for Company1 doing Shoobaboo-ing code things and that’s what led me to the Snarfus. So, let’s dive in! 

annie's blog

“There is no joy more intense than that of coming upon a fact that cannot be understood in terms of currently accepted ideas."

Astronomer Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin was born #OTD in 1900. She used quantum mechanics to decode the spectral lines of stars and deduce their elemental composition, concluding they are mostly H and He, and was the first woman to be made full professor and department chair at Harvard.

Image: Harvard Observatory

‘Fixers, he says, “know and see different things — indeed, different worlds — than the better-known figures of ‘designer’ or ‘user.’” Breakdown has “world-disclosing properties.” Similarly, Stephen Graham and Nigel Thrift identify breakdown and failure as “the means by which societies learn to reproduce,” because the repair of broken systems always involves elements of “adaptation and improvisation.”’
@shannonmattern

https://placesjournal.org/article/maintenance-and-care/

Maintenance and Care: Fixing a Broken World

A working guide to the repair of rust, dust, cracks, and corrupted code in our cities, our homes, and our social relations.

Places Journal

“It says that when you build a thing you cannot merely build that thing in isolation, but must also repair the world around it, and within it, so that the larger world at that one place becomes more coherent, and more whole; and the thing which you make takes its place in the web of nature, as you make it.”

— Christopher Alexander (A Pattern Language, 1977)

I posted the first 50 or so slides of my Software Architecture and System Design Intro section on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ruth-malan-4558153_system-design-and-software-architecture-ugcPost-7252896158908325888-EIpd

And then with each Reshare (15! TY) and Like, I was reminded that I'm sooo uncomfortable with stopping before we get to Design in Context and Co-Evolutionary Design etc ...

This unfolds more of the picture:

System Design and Architecture (Introduction): https://www.ruthmalan.com/Bredemeyer/20241021SystemDesignIntro.pdf

Ruth Malan on LinkedIn: System Design and Software Architecture

The next System Design and Software Architecture workshop starts on Monday, so naturally I'm reworking sections. This selection of slides from the…

Psychological Safety vs. High Standards: A Misunderstood Dynamic

The term “psychological safety” is often misleading. When managers hear safety, many dismiss it as a soft style that implies complacency. Meanwhile, psychology implies too much mumbo jumbo. High-profile figures like Elon Musk advocating for a “hardcore” style perpetuate this misconception. But this is a fundamental misunderstanding of the relationship

Leading Sapiens
we've been slowly working on adding alt text to all of the pages in the Wizard Zines archive at https://wizardzines.com/comics/. It's not done yet but for the ones that are, they're all actually searchable by alt text!

The committee concluded that the “failure sequence” of the #Arecibo Telescope took 39 months and began with the effects of Hurricane #Maria in September 2017.

https://gizmodo.com/jaw-dropping-report-reveals-causes-of-arecibo-telescope-collapse-2000517284

Jaw-Dropping Report Reveals Causes of Arecibo Telescope Collapse

An investigation by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine found Hurricane Maria worsened a slow decay of the Arecibo Observatory's support cables.

Gizmodo

Comet C/2023 A3 next to the Milky Way and over the San Juan River, Utah. There's a big oxbow cutoff canyon that the river flows in that's barely visible in the dark portion of this photograph. As with my earlier comet photos, a moonlight, fill light is really helpful when photographing comets. Some moonlight would have been helpful to illuminate the canyon walls in this shot.

#Comet #Astronomy #AstroPhotography #Photography #Darktable

Don't give up on self care just because something didn't work for you. Keep trying new ways of being kind to yourself!