Getting so tired of the war metaphors in attempts to describe software development. We solve business problems using code, we don't make a living by role-playing military tactics. Chill out my dudes
Regardless of your job or responsibilities, if you are new to a certain domain, find users or customers to talk to. If you can't talk to them directly, find colleagues who do, and ask to be a fly on the wall. Meet at least 10. Write down their day to day jobs, their challenges and their frustrations. Even from just listening to others talk, you will get a good perspective.
To speed it up, write an interview script with a set of questions. Use an LLM to make the questions non-leading if you want, but point is to show colleagues who have customer contact your script. If you manage to do the interviews, record them, transcribe them and share them around. You are now a customer advocate who knows the customer's needs and wants.
Don't wait with doing this only after you've met the team, start immediately. Let this be your driving force to meet colleagues. It's useful, offer to share the results, or ask for question ideas to whoever wants to listen to you.
You now have laid the groundwork for your success. Now you can focus on the organisation, the team, the mission, the proposition, etc. Everyone you now meet, talk about how customers want to do A or B but can't, or about their challenges. People will appreciate your insight and you're off to a great start!
I've got two IKEA FLOAT Led panels on my ceiling, each 2400 lumen. The panels can be adjusted in Kelvin (2200 to 4000) and are dimmable, so when it's evening and I need to get some work done I turn them a lot more yellow to not mess with my sleep rhythm. I find making the room very bright helps a lot with waking up and focus, compared to when I had only one or two bulbs as lighting. It does take some getting used to as some have already pointed out here.
I've seen more people interested in this topic so I'm adding some recent links I've came across:
I've been running a pi-hole on my home network for years and I love it, it consistently blocks about 19% of outgoing requests. Some of the benefits for us are:
- It disables (and hides) the annoying ads on our Samsung smart TV
- Browsing is noticeably smoother (especially recipe websites on mobile!)
- Most front-end browser trackers are blocked
- It's now possible to see how often apps or devices tend to phone home by just logging into the Pihole web interface
- We're not giving (most of) our DNS activity to our ISP
- Updating to a newer version is a breeze with docker
Some thoughts for folks considering getting one (or more):
- I've not locked it down further with a firewall yet to force all DNS requests to go through the Pihole, but I'm planning to.
- I won't run a Pihole container on my UDM as it will likely mess with future updates and settings, keeping things separate feels better.
- Sometimes I consider adding more blocklists but every time I do, something gets annoying somewhere and I usually end up reverting to the standard config.
My pet peeve has become to report login flows or frontend interactions that break when the tracking script fails to load because of my Pihole. It doesn't happen often luckily :-).
A book I keep coming back to (re-read every two years or so) and recommend others is "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance".
It has shaped my thinking on 'what is good' or 'what does quality' mean. As an engineer it is easy to appreciate the author slowly going insane about the details he keeps coming back to, and as a human it is invaluable to have an understanding yourself of when something is 'good'.
I'd like to add https://soverin.net/features here as well. It's similar to Posteo but offers unlimited aliases and more storage. Servers hosted in the Netherlands.
I was a Soverin customer for a year but recently made the switch to Fastmail. I really wanted to like them, but sadly it seems like Soverin is content with their product being in a (barely) beta state. During the year that I used them, there were no improvements to spam filtering (which is abysmal), single sign on (nonexistent), reliability (poor, particularly for caldav) or filtering rules, to name just a few pain points. Their customer service was super responsive, but usually just to tell me that whatever I was asking about (flagging false positives, filtering mail based on an address pattern) wasn't supported.
Soverin, please look at what Fastmail is doing and try to get at least 80% as good. The world needs more fastmails.
Just browsing the papers linked in the article you can find some relevant things:
[Effects on trees and plants]
The microwaves may affect vegetables. In the area that received radiation directly from “Location Skrunda Radio Station” (Latvia), pines (Pinus sylvestris) experienced a lower growth radio. This did not occur beyond the area of impact of electromagnetic waves. A statistically significant negative correlation between increase tree growth and intensity of electromagnetic field was found, and was confirmed that the beginning of this growth decline coincided in time with the start of radar emissions. Authors evaluated other possible environmental factors which might have intervened, but none had noticeable effects [103]. In another study investigating cell ultrastructure of pine needles irradiated by the same radar, there was an increase of resin production, and was interpreted as an effect of stress caused by radiation, which would explain the aging and declining growth and viability of trees subjected to pulsed microwaves. They also found a low germination of seeds of pine trees more exposed [104]. The effects of Latvian radar was also felt by aquatic plants. Spirodela polyrrhiza exposed to a power density between 0.1 and 1.8 μW/cm2 had lower longevity, problems in reproduction and morphological and developmental abnormalities compared with a control group who grew up far from the radar [105].
My immediate problem with this study is that they personally selected a sample of 60 damaged trees near radio transmitters to compare to a selected sample of healthy trees away from radio transmitters. The conclusions is effectively built into their sampling.
Huh. This does sound bad and honestly quite scary. Is there any theorizing made on how these plants get affected by radar? What exactly is the biological mechanism at play here?
> A well-studied potential mechanism of harm from radiofrequency radiation is one of cellular oxidation. Healthy biological systems require a balance of oxidation and antioxidation to fight infection and prevent disease (44, 45, 46). A review of the literature by Yakymenko et al. (2016) confirmed that in 93 of 100 studies, non-ionizing radio- frequency radiation caused a cellular stress response with excessive reactive oxygen species. He concluded, “oxidative stress induced by RFR exposure should be recognized as one of the primary mechanisms of the biological activity of this kind of radiation.”
How do you get mm-wave radiation to an aquatic plant? Skin depth at that frequency is tiny. Are they doing studies on duckweed? (Look up the plant, indeed, they are.) And I can see how pine needles might be more affected, what with size and pointy tips.
You didn't post any causal explanation, just correlation.
Assuming the correlation was significant, maybe low magnetic fields along the radar are responsible, or transient spikes, high frequency (dys-)harmonics - because it says "pulsed" but I don't know whether it means square pulse or rather probably not. Might latvias Equip is slightly out of tune, who knows. Noisy relais is no rarity at all.
Before conducting controlled experiments (which can verify causality) it's usual to conduct compared studies, which find the experimental factor occuring in a population and study its outcome. It's enough to establish correlation, much cheaper, and you can do it today instead of waiting however long it takes for the experiment (years if you have to grow trees while exposing them to microwave radiation)
Trees are quiet good at scattering RF mostly do to the water in them, their density of leaves/needles and the random orientation that they grow in. This leads to significant attenuation of the signal even if it isn't absorbed by anything. It's also worth noting that dried wood is almost RF transparent.
This is an increasing problem in advertising everywhere. If we keep using attractive skinny people in our product shots, photo shoots and marketing communication, we will push a growing disconnect between that and actual, real people.
When people can't identify (which is the initial goal of using people in your communication) with the messaging, they won't think it's for them.
Fit, attractive people exist! "Actual Real" people? Do you mean chubby and out of shape? Or morbidly obese? Or what?
If you are referring to the fact that there are more fat people than skinny people, ok. Keep this in mind; that fact is not the fault of the people whom have managed to stay fit either by luck, genes, or hard work. People need to be honest with themselves and get their butts moving.
Yeah they are selling a lifestyle fix. It wouldn't be bad to get some normal people before and after photos. But the founders should be examples and they should live by their program and be an example for would-be customers.
My point was that the founders real personalities and story are absent and instead we see stock photos.
Head of PM here. I lead 3 PMs in my current position at Styla.com and have taught product management at General Assembly courses.
I myself come from a self-taught programmer background and found myself questioning the product strategy or design decisions towards managers until I was offered a PM position. I do find the technical background enables me to level with devs quite easily but I don't think it's a requirement.
A pattern that has been working very well at SoundCloud is that we liked to transition customer support people into a PM role.
Important feats or skills I additionally look for in good PMs are:
- be a users advocate. Has to be good at putting themselves into the users' position and transfer that perspective to the team.
- has to be really good at email. Org/management/soft skills aside, the most powerful tool of a PM is email.
- eager to learn and apply those learnings quickly.
- be comfortable with numbers but be skeptical at the same time. Data is important but be wary of bias.
Happy to see there is an increased interest in this topic. I've been reading a bit about hydroponics lately which was sparked by IKEA's indoor gardening product line [1].
I think there are definitely technological advancements being used to make this more accessible, although most of it seems heavily focused on hydro- or aeroponics.
While Grovegrown is a super exciting product [2] it doesn't fit the yield you are looking for.
Perhaps Farmfromabox [3] is an interesting pointer, which seems closest to what you described.
