Reading list

• So here’s one way to do it. Kotick, CEO of Activion Blizzard has been under quite some pressure to fix “workplace culture”, which in plain speak means sexual harassment. Stories about Koticks own culpability has been gaining traction as well. So what do you do? Sell the company for 70 billion dollars to Microsoft and quit your job. Good, done and dusted.
• Hyperstructures!
• Not going to pretend to have actually read this entire piece, but those who do will have their neurons hook up in amazing new ways. It’s a seriously well made run down of how GPS actually works, and how one man was able to make huge strides for humanity making it a little better.

Design of the week

• Trying to keep a They Took Our Jobs tantrum internal. Framer is, once again, where it’s at when it comes to wysiwyg design+build+publish.
• They’re Taking Our Jobs again. Vercel is adding insult to injury with their Platforms Starter Kit.
• Solvency is a tool to create a bespoke contract and handling the logics of minting an NFT artwork. Art is obviously elusive, and it requires a whole lot of domain knowledge to fully grasp and innovate technology and logics intersecting with art. Kudis to Ezra Miller for putting in the labour.

Tech of the week

• 1Password, the gatekeeper to the Feed teams shared passwords, hit a valuation of $6.8B after the largest funding round for a Canadian company ever. There are many reasons to praise AgileBits besides their money earning talent. The password manager was, and is, a major problem solver for one of the digital age’s biggest latent problems. Many are doing the same, but they mostly remain overshadowed by AgileBits creativity and productivity. Agilebits has also avoided geting Sherlocked, somehow.
• Answering to why 1Password need 600 employees, Mitchel Cohen, a 1Password Product Director, reveals what type of ingenuity it takes to retain the level of security and zero-knowledge in the tiniest of features; namely the way the app grabs and stores app icons. This is all part of 1Passwords magic sauce.
• This. The U.S. Federal Government, widely regarded as one of the most open and fair spirited bureaucracies in the world, is giving us this somewhat suprising look into their unified Google Analytics account. The most downloaded file from any government site is currently a 404 at IRS.gov.
• But hang on, hold my Sierra Nevada Pale Ale a minute. Austria won’t have any of this nonsense. As of Jan 13, Google Analytics is illegal. It’s illegal to transfer EU citizens data to servers processing visitor data on US controleld servers. And right now, 61% of all visitors to US federal sites are non-US, a substantial portion of which originates form within the EU. If you’re wondering if a site complies with Austrian regulation or not just hit it up on Illegal Analytics Scanner.
• Back to some more common themes. Remix is the new kid on the block, an alternative to Next.js. Here’s an interesting read on how and why you should start using Remix. Penned by Remix.
• Hey, so have you ever dreamt of having an NFT profile picture on Twitter? Now you can. We’re filing this under one or more of Murphy’s alternative laws. Possibly “whatever can happen, will happen”. Or “any solution can create it’s own problem”. Either way, it’s clearly a glass half full/empty situation.