Yes, It’s All Your Fault: Active vs. Passive Mindsets

The passive mindset is defined by an attitude, an assumption that life happens to you and you’re not responsible. People with this mindset also say things like, “Why does this always happen to me?”
When the language you use about things going on in your life is passive, you slowly convince yourself that nothing is your responsibility. This makes you feel good because it absolves you from responsibility. It means you don’t have to look inside yourself and change anything.  It means you’re not in control.
Well I have news for you: you are in control. You’re in control of how you respond to the ups and downs of life. You’re in control of how you talk to yourself.
An active attitude means ownership. You own your failures. An active mindset means you are responsible for things you control.

Source: Yes, It’s All Your Fault: Active vs. Passive Mindsets

What a 16th-century mystic can teach us about making good decisions

Ignatius offers three imaginative exercises if no clear choice emerges:

  • Imagine that a friend comes to you with the same situation. They describe their choices, pros and cons, and their thoughts and feelings about these proposals. What would you advise them?
  • Imagine that you are on your deathbed. Looking back at your life, and assuming you made the decision in question, how do you view it from that perspective?
  • Imagine a conversation with the divine. Those who do not believe in a God could have an imaginary conversation with someone they loved and trusted and who has passed away. What does this person say to you about your options? Would they be pleased, disappointed or neutral about your decision?

Source: What a 16th-century mystic can teach us about making good decisions

Do you have a self-actualised personality? Maslow revisited | Aeon Ideas

Now Scott Barry Kaufman, a psychologist at Barnard College, Columbia University, believes it is time to revive the concept, and link it with contemporary psychological theory. ‘We live in times of increasing divides, selfish concerns, and individualistic pursuits of power,’ Kaufman wrote recently in a blog in Scientific American introducing his new research. He hopes that rediscovering the principles of self-actualisation might be just the tonic that the modern world is crying out for. To this end, he’s used modern statistical methods to create a test of self-actualisation or, more specifically, of the 10 characteristics exhibited by self-actualised people, and it was recently published in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology.

Source: Do you have a self-actualised personality? Maslow revisited | Aeon Ideas

Low-Latency Java: Part 1 — Introduction – DZone Java

This is the first article of a multi-part series on low-latency programming in Java. At the end of this introductory article, you will have grasped the following concepts: What is latency, and why should I worry about it as a developer? How is latency characterized, and what do percentile numbers mean? What factors contribute to latency? So, without further ado, let’s begin.

Source: Low-Latency Java: Part 1 — Introduction – DZone Java

A lot of the fear of smart phones and social media may be based on faulty data – Marginal REVOLUTION

A lot of the fear of smart phones and social media may be based on faulty data by  Tyler Cowen April 1, 2019 at 1:42 pm in Data Source Web/Tech New research shows that the fear of smart phones and social media was built on a castle made of sand. Turns out almost all of previous research never bothered to validate their assessments of smart phone use – and that appears to have been a HUGE mistake. That is from Patrick Markey at Villanova, here is the whole thread.  Here Dr. Andrea Howard has some comments a

Source: A lot of the fear of smart phones and social media may be based on faulty data – Marginal REVOLUTION

Back-end – Front-End Versioning – Christian Findlay's Software Development

Conclusion

I have looked at two patterns here. The first is shaping up to be the Internet’s go to option. Most of us are becoming familiar with the pattern and expect the APIs we work in the same way. However, what I have witnessed is that most development teams are not ready for the kind of discipline that is required for API versioning. This will probably need to change in future, and in your development team, you should be thinking about this problem – especially if you are considering mobile app development, or public API deployment. The BFF pattern might give you a bit of wiggle room when you have a tight deadline, but it’s not a very good long term solution. If you’re looking at deploying to the app store, you should look at alternative deployment options like Apple Developer Enterprise Program, and Google Play for enterprises. I will add more on these in subsequent articles.

Source: Back-end – Front-End Versioning – Christian Findlay’s Software Development

Microservices Anti-Patterns – DZone Microservices

Summary

In this post, we talked about the microservices antipatterns that I have witnessed working with clients of all sizes. The ones we talked about here were:

  • Break the Piggy Bank
  • Everything Micro (Except for the Data)
  • We are Agile! a.k.a. The Frankenstein

After each, we also tried to give some hope and show a path forward to help correct the mistakes of each.
I hope you enjoyed this at least as much as blue/green deployment with no sev 1 issues!

Source: Microservices Anti-Patterns – DZone Microservices

At 71, She’s Never Felt Pain or Anxiety. Now Scientists Know Why. – The New York Times

She’d been told that childbirth was going to be painful. But as the hours wore on, nothing bothered her — even without an epidural.

“I could feel that my body was changing, but it didn’t hurt me,” recalled the woman, Jo Cameron, who is now 71. She likened it to “a tickle.” Later, she would tell prospective mothers, “Don’t worry, it’s not as bad as people say it is.”

It was only recently — more than four decades later — that she learned her friends were not exaggerating.

Rather, there was something different about the way her body experienced pain: For the most part, it didn’t.

Source: At 71, She’s Never Felt Pain or Anxiety. Now Scientists Know Why. – The New York Times

Don’t solve the problem. – Signal v. Noise

I
I was reminded of this counterintuitive concept when chatting with Wade Foster, CEO of Zapier, on our Heartbeat podcast. Though his company today is thriving with over 200 employees and over 2 million users, Wade admitted how he struggled in the early days as a CEO when an employee would come to him with a problem:

“When you [jump in and try to solve the problem yourself] you’re actually mistaking your roles. You’ve hired this person to solve problems. And if they’re unable to solve the problem, you’ve probably hired the wrong person.”

In other words, your role as a manager is not to solve problems. It’s to help others solve problems, themselves. Leadership is stewardship. It’s navigating your team through treacherous waters, around jagged rocks, to the desired destination, and making sure folks feel nourished and rested along the way. But you can’t be a good steward if you’re scampering around trying to paddle all the oars faster, yourself. To take the boat analogy one step further, a great manager is a coxswain, not a rower.

Source: Don’t solve the problem. – Signal v. Noise

Development Things For Reflection 2019 03 24

Dani Rodrik: The Good Jobs Challenge: “[For] developing countries… existing technologies allow insufficient room for factor substitution: using less-skilled labor instead of skilled professionals or physical capital. The demanding quality standards needed to supply global value chains cannot be easily met by replacing machines with manual labor. This is why globally integrated production in even the most labor-abundant countries, such as India or Ethiopia, relies on relatively capital-intensive methods…. The standard remedy of improving educational institutions does not yield near-term benefits, while the economy’s most advanced sectors are unable to absorb the excess supply of low-skilled workers. Solving this problem may require… boosting an intermediate range of labor-intensive, low-skilled economic activities. Tourism and non-traditional agriculture… public employment … non-tradable services carried out by small and medium-size enterprises, will not be among the most productive, which is why they are rarely the focus of industrial or innovation policies. But they may still provide significantly better jobs than the alternatives in the informal sector