The sixth issue of Weekly Digest and the first one in February is out! Today I’ve 9 interesting links - you can read, among others, about:
- what is the decoy effect and how it is used in pricing,
- story about hacking a real person,
- insights on productivity experiment.
If you find this interesting drop me a line on social media - Mastodon, Twitter or LinkedIn!
1. The Untold Story of SQLite
https://corecursive.com/066-sqlite-with-richard-hipp/
An episode of CoRecursive podcast where Adam Gordon Bell (host) is talking with Richard Hipp - primary author of SQLite (yes! that small but powerful database!). Hear (or read) the story small open-source project that is today used almost everywhere.
2. I lost $209,640 of my own money trying to start a business.
https://www.mostlymetrics.com/p/i-lost-209640-of-my-own-money-trying
We all heard the stories about “my startup skyrocketed and now I’m a billionaire”. But what about who didn’t make it? This is a bitter story about failing, losing more than 200 thousand dollars and learning a lot of stuff in the meantime. Worth reading if you are about to start your own business!
3. “In roughly two hours, 1647 devices are about to be locked out of access to organisation resources, wiped, and removed from Intune permanently.”
https://infosec.exchange/@SecurityWriter/109777576538835360
Ah, being compliant with own procedures and removing non-compliant devices from the company. A short story where everyone knows that doom is coming, but nobody wanted to do anything with that. And now almost 2000 people cannot do anything related to the organisation.
4. Operation Luigi: How I hacked my friend without her noticing
https://mango.pdf.zone/operation-luigi-how-i-hacked-my-friend-without-her-noticing
Not new (from 2017!) but a very interesting blogpost where Alex (the author) is trying and succeeding in hacking their friend Diane. Starting with gathering data from various sources (“googling furiously”), trying to hack into an account and making phishing attempt. Worth reading and worth remembering!
5. Decoy Effect
https://matt-rickard.com/decoy-effect
Did you think why big coffee cost only $0.10 more than medium one? One price is a decoy to steer the buyer to make some choice. This phenomenon is called the decoy effect!
6. I Hired 5 People to Sit Behind Me and Make Me Productive for a Month
https://simonberens.me/blog/i-hired-5-people
Interesting experiment on boosting productivity - the guy hired people to sit behind him for 16 hours a day to make sure that he will be productive. Turns out he was more productive having a “friendly spectator” behind!
7. Embrace the Grind
https://jacobian.org/2021/apr/7/embrace-the-grind/
Let’s face the truth - we are all lazy. And that is good - we are creating new things because we don’t want to do something. After all, it is hard. But what if we will spent a lot of time on some boring stuff instead? It feels like magic and even if it is a magic trick - preparation is the key to success.
8. Carving the Scheduler Out of Our Orchestrator
https://fly.io/blog/carving-the-scheduler-out-of-our-orchestrator/
Building apps is now relatively easy. The problem is arising when you want to deploy, make some high-availability on more than one server, run multiple apps on one server etc - the orchestration. In this post authors of Fly.io platform are describing orchestrators work and how they created their own solution when current ones were not sufficient.
9. You can always go faster (if you know where to risk it)
https://world.hey.com/dhh/you-can-always-go-faster-if-you-know-where-to-risk-it-f62fcca4
The early development slogan for Facebook was “move fast and break things”, but does any company can follow it? As always - depends on the scale and the risk of failing. Read how Basecamp initially (in the early days) included customers in their Q&A process.