Five for Friday – July 21, 2023

Not only are we smack in the heat of summer, but for the first time in nearly four years, Seattle will actually look like people live there when 70,000 Taylor Swift fans, combined with 30,000 baseball fans all try to get downtown at once.

Should be a blast. Meanwhile, here is some stuff worth sharing.

• I went on a hike a few weeks ago. I knew I’d be walking 8+ hours a day for 4+ days, so I thought an audio book would be in order. My criteria was pretty narrow: It had to be fiction – and not great fiction, since I didn’t want to have to rewind to replay parts where I was concentrating on footing or animals or whatever. I still wanted it to be entertaining enough to keep my interest, and because I’m super-cheap, it had to be available for free through the library. The Origin by Dan Brown was perfect. The story, while laughably predictable, had just enough of the canonical Brown literary bubble gum to keep me interested throughout the hike. It’s not serious reading, but it was fun.
• I meant to post this last week, but Elisabeth Hendrickson wrote a great article a few weeks back on Expanding Universes and Fixed Envelopes
• …and from even farther back, but found today – this is helpful. What is Developer Experience? a roundup of links and goodness
• Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory have another great post in their series – this time on building a foundation of core practices
• I ran across this article on Escaping the Availability Trap. It’s a good read, and good fodder for everyone who insists they are “too busy” to get meaningful work done. We all get the same 24 hours a day – we all just have different ideas on how to organize and prioritize that time.

Once again, that’s all. See you on the other side of this wild Seattle weekend.