Oogis dad will turn 60 next week. Her mom decided to surprise him with a family weekend retreat. We rented a beautiful Villa on the beach and spent our time eating and resting, just like god intended. All in all, everybody had a great time. The kids got to see some sea, and the only thing missing was hot water in the shower. That, and Noona.
I always had a hard time understanding the gap between the culture of (some) companies, and the harshness of (most) standard employment agreements. A company with an open culture, that may even encourage side projects and open source contribution, still has legalese about all inventions being the sole property of the company… Once again, Joel Gascoigne from Buffer stands behind their transparent culture, and tackles the issue of the employment agreement with a pledge to employees. To my understanding, the pledge Joel presents contradicts the employment agreement (at least in spirit), and the employment agreement takes precedence. Despite that, I think it’s good to convey the spirit of the employer-employee relation in plain language, as the employer sees it.
What do you think? As an employer? Employee?
The Weekly Review is a recurring (so-far-)weekly summary, reviewing highlights from the last week.
Blog posts from the last week
- For the first time, I reposted an article from an external source. It was an excellent post about Python logging traps. Good stuff. (next week I have a guest post planned, so stay tuned! 🙂 )
- ShellFoo – getting a cpplint breakdown report on all project source files.
- Some Mac training stuff – assigning keyboard shortcuts for arbitrary OS X apps.
- The previous weekly review.
If you’ve been following my SCons series, be assured that I have more episodes coming up. In case you’re interested, I finished implementing and deploying most of the SCons enhancements I planned in DayJob, so I have all that to cover.
The best way to keep up with new posts is to follow the feed.
Web selections
Let’s Encrypt is a new free certificate authority, with the goal to let everyone be up and running with basic server certificates for their domains through a simple one-click process. Worthy goal indeed, planned to become available sometime during 2015. I’ll definitely consider setting up SSL here if it will be free and simple! I don’t see great importance in offering SSL where it isn’t needed, like this blog, but it makes for a generally more secure Internet, so why not. This initiative is based in the US, meaning that the it’s as trusted as the US government though…
Wix.com wrote a guest post on the Google Cloud Platform blog, about using multiple cloud deployments to reach high availability. Interesting.
In a recent This Week in Google podcast, Gina Trapani mentioned Good Web Bundle. For $96, you can get a yearly subscription for 5 web sites, like [MetaFilter[(http://www.metafilter.com/), The Toast, and ThinkUp. Pretty good, if you’re actually interested in 3 or more of those!
OS X Yosemite introduced JavaScript for automation. Here’s a nice getting started guide on using JavaScript for OS X automation, by Alex Guyot.
Protractor is an end-to-end test framework for AngularJS applications. Protractor runs tests against your application, running in a real browser, interacting with it as a user would. It was built and released to open source by a team in Google. I’m a big believer in software testing at large, and this is one less excuse to skip Angular-based front-end testing! 🙂
Check out this Linux security distros comparison on Lifehacker, by Thorin Klosowski. It covers Tails, Kali, and Qubes. TL;DR: use Tails for anonymous web browsing; use Kali for offensive “research”; use Qubes to isolate environments with VM-based cells.
Look! Google introduced autoscaling for Google Compute Engine!
Nice article on the importance of software quality to support scalability, from the airbnb engineering blog. It covers code conformity (coding style guidelines), peer review, and testing. Basic, but important stuff indeed.
If you like the idea of DIY home automation, but Arduino and Raspberry-Pi are not your cup of tea, check out this littleBits Smart Home Kit. Looks fun!
Side project updates
Nothing with the website project. That means no new bugs this week! 🙂 (but also no progress on loose ends…)
Working on new stuff for Mac training – like the post from last Thursday. Expect some more soon.
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