Here is a digest of the best links each week.
The Pandemic: the reality we live in
The active case of coronavirus across the United States continues to soar this week. You need a test? It’s much easier to get in wealthier, whiter neighborhoods, but the disease is hitting Black and Hispanic communities hardest. Meanwhile, it’s always inspiring to hear the heroic stories about many normal people across the country during the pandemic, like this one:
When the coronavirus outbreak threatened to rock Philadelphia’s predominantly Black neighborhoods, Dr. Ala Stanford knew that access to COVID-19 tests was going to be a problem. So she rented a van, loaded it up and headed to the areas of the city where residents needed tests the most. Every test conducted was free.
The impossible decisions of who to treat and who to send home to die are also left upon doctors in the ‘red zones’ of coronavirus, where there aren’t enough resources to care the growing cases. The principle of “triage” is to provide the greatest amount of good for the greatest number, but it’s complicated and hard for doctors to stay true to this principle.
Disruptions: how it might be different
What should cities be like in 2050? – a design for a question asked by National Geographic.
We can dream of the best design including all the new techniques that may come up in the next three decades and the life we want. However, if not everyone take climate crisis seriously now, it would be a much more depressing world waiting ahead instead.
Insights: raise the bar for ourselves
Knowledge workers can learn like an athlete by setting up learning objective, daily and weekly goals, cohesive and diverse activities. Knowledge is not only cumulative, but also has a compounding effect. “The more you learn, the easier it is to learn.”
You also can have better memory skills for all sorts of knowledge. I am really bad at memorizing things, so I keep looking for techniques to help myself. Both the multi-sensory and memory palace techniques are recommended by many experts. I found them super effective too. Give it a try!
Leadership: the ideas for better collaboration
When we talk about engineering leadership, your team’s code review rules may not come to the top of the list. However, it’s one of the most important process to scale a software engineering team. The post is not complete on this topic, but it touches two major points:
- your team need a serious code review process (e.g. at least two non-manager reviewers for each change in this post); and
- each change needs test to cover its own correctness and protect against the bug it intends to fix.
There are a lot of best practices and tools for better code review. I will put it into a separate post later.
Economy: the science hidden among fallacies
The signs of economic recovery has been confusingly mixed since the start of the coronavirus pandemic. While many economic indicators look depressing, stock market has bounced back to pre-pandemic level. FiveThirtyEight shared their findings from the survey of economists on the metrics they use to evaluate the recovery of economics:
The core metrics they used mostly in order are: gross domestic product (GDP), unemployment rate, retail and food sales (covid specific), consumer confidence, and saving rate. These metrics are main indicators reflecting the recovery progress of overall economy, but they are lagging behind (GDP is quarterly, unemployment is monthly.) To compensate that, another set of fast-moving metrics are also being monitored including (ordered by popularity): consumer spending, initial unemployment claims, job postings, traffic, and mobility. I am surprised that housing metrics like forbearance or eviction are not considered. However, no matter which metric to use, the economy is in deep trouble now.