Fiona Voss

Education researcher and activist Ira Socol argues that children from less privileged backgrounds need not “grit” but “slack.” For children who must display grit in their day-to-day lives, Socol believes schools should be places of “abundance” where they can experience the kind of freedom and opportunity people from more privileged backgrounds take for granted.

[…]

As Socol says, some kids may have exhausted their supply of grit just making it to the school building. Others may have a hard time being zesty when they’re hungry.

John Warner, Why They Can’t Write

GPAs are like driving speeds. Anybody with a GPA lower than mine is an idiot, and anyone with a GPA higher than mine is a teacher’s pet with no curiosity or social life.

On the web not of the web

E.T.A. Hoffmann’s original book The Nutcracker and the Mouse King is criminally unknown and under-appreciated. Instead of seeing that weird new Disney movie this December, read the book—and be sure to get the version with illustrations by Roberto Innocenti.

I want to read a book about intellectual property law, written the way Mary Roach would write it. Short, funny, something you could read on a beach, where details don’t have to be relevant, just interesting—but informative and scrupulously researched. Any recommendations?

I know I am very late to the game here but RuPaul’s Drag Race is every bit the self-aware lovechild of Top Model and Project Runway that everybody says it is, and if you enjoyed either of those shows back in their heydays, you have got to be watching.

Finished reading Talking from 9 to 5: Women and Men at Work by Deborah Tannen. It’s about the conflicts that arise when different conversational styles clash. I strongly recommend it to everyone, but especially to men who want to be better to the women they work with.

Shower thought: what would child beauty pageants look like if the judges were also children?

Helsinki’s €100m new library includes sewing machines, recording studios and kitchens (and books) 😍😍😍

Various Twitter accounts are abusing Unicode to get fake italic and bold styles. Meanwhile, Micro.blog actually supports basic HTML. Even hyperlinks!

Wondering what the female equivalent of the Go to Hell pant is.

onpaste="return false;", you are no match for my inspect & delete skills.

Started a knitting project after a long hiatus and noticed a new similiarity between knitting and coding: reading knitting, like reading code, is arguably a higher order skill than making it. A newbie can follow a knitting pattern, but if they lose their place, they’ll struggle to figure out where they left off, while an expert can figure it out by reading their stitches. Similarly, a newbie can write code, until it gets complicated enough that they lose their place and can’t follow the logic anymore. And with both crafts, the ability to read your work is what allows you to go back and fix mistakes, whether that means unraveling a few columns to fix a cable crossed the wrong way, or fixing a bug in your code.

Having recently wrapped up selling my first car, my advice is: take your car to Carmax first. They won’t offer you the highest price, but they make selling so easy. Once you get their offer, you can look for other buyers and know exactly how much the extra effort will earn you.

Spent last night in Santa Barbara en route from San Diego to Mountain View. Stayed at Harbor House Inn and walked to The Brewhouse for dinner, McConnell’s Fine Ice Creams for dessert, and Dawn Patrol for breakfast. Probably won’t repeat the drive any time soon, but if I do I’d love to stop in SB again—preferably for two nights next time. Would definitely stay at Harbor House again.

Rei do Gado in San Diego is indeed a “meat lover’s paradise” as the sign outside says. Also: cinnamon honey glazed pineapple, and cantaloupe so good I didn’t recognize it as cantaloupe.

Turing School’s student outcomes report includes some interesting stats most bootcamps don’t publish: how many students were employed by the school, or in other fields than software development–and how many had a prior CS degree.

Salad and then a milkshake is a good lunch. Milkshake and then a salad, I do not recommend.

The photos in this article about “tiny conferences” might lead you to believe that it’s just an excuse to go on swanky vacations, but I love the idea of getting together with 10-12 peers to discuss shared professional interests.

One of my favorite things to watch on YouTube is clips from pet weight loss TV shows, and one of my favorite things about them is that the animals have the best names. Examples: Brownie Cakes the dog and Beau Nugget the cat.

What is up with websites where I can be three minutes into reading an article on my phone, only to scroll down and see the second half of the text hasn’t loaded yet? How exactly do you mess up in that specific way?

TIL about the Darvaza gas crater, a.k.a. the Gates of Hell, a natural gas field collapsed into an underground cavern that is thought to have been burning continuously since 1971!

A couple days ago a Slack friend posted:

i’d love to have a digital picture frame on my desk that shows one calvin and hobbes cartoon per day

I think this is a brilliant idea. Not only Calvin and Hobbes, but basically anything you might see on a page-a-day calendar. Word of the day, New Yorker cartoons, inspirational quotes or fun facts. You could buy the device once, and purchase as many content bundles as you want. It would last for more than a year, but you could also switch up the theme more frequently. And since page-a-day calendars are traditionally black and white, an e-ink screen would work great for this concept.

Nice series of articles about pair programming from Tuple:

• The Case for Pair Programming
• Scientific Research Into Pair Programming
• Lesser-Known Benefits of Pair Programming
• How to pair with a junior developer
• Pair Programming Styles
• Pair Programming Antipatterns

Two cool dev-related things that used to cost money are now free: Thoughtbot’s learning platform Upcase, and Code Climate’s Quality tool for teams of up to 4 people (public repos were always free, now private ones are too). I like this trend! What’s next?