Author: dineth
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Changing jobs
I left my job at the end of August. It was scary to leave Expedia Group after 8 years. There were a lot of good times, growth and friendships đ. Given the global spread of 125 makers reporting up to me, the job was challenging and stressful. In the last 8 weeks, I’ve refocused my…
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App Store
Something we used to talk about in university was the impact an operating system can have on people. A system designer imagines the future and creates capabilities that its users can leverage. It is a form of influence on users to adopt the imagined future. Users, however, behave in unpredictable ways. A system starts to…
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đ§ The amazing history behind The Pirate Bay and its fight to stay open
A gripping story about a few kids getting together and fighting power in the open Internet. Account given by one of the founders. Love it. Have a listen. https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/92 The Pirate Bay is a website, a search engine, which has an index of torrent files. A lot of copyrighted material is listed on the site,…
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Hackathons
I don’t like Hackathons. I remember when they went from fun to not-so-fun. I was part of the frontend modernisation project at Expedia. It was a long arduous project, filled with many many technical and people challenges. I loved it. Every day felt like a rush and we were doing something difficult that was going…
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A messy change in direction for iPad
Enjoyed reading this article from David Pierce at TheVerge on Stage Manager. It is not going well for Apple as far as iPadOS is concerned. Here in the real world, trying to figure out how Stage Manager works turns into a wild puzzle requiring a wall of Polaroids and a ball of yarn. The issue…
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Learnings from “Seeing like a State” by James C Scott
Seeing like a State inspects attempts of states bringing âadministrative order of nature and societyâ thatâs led to disastrous outcomes. It is an interesting window into inspecting how large, people based systems work at scale. High Modernism The book inspects state’s appetite to use âhigh modernismâ to solve issues at scale. “High modernism is a…
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Tasmania, take #2
Took a week off in Tasmania to unwind. It was full of excitement! After our first visit to Cradle Mountain cancelled by a metre of snow, we were determined to stick out the 300mm rain in one day to walk the mountains. It was worth the wait. We got some spectacular walks in. We managed…
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Twitter thread on “preventing frustration”
Found this awesome Twitter thread by Ken Kocienda while reading about iPhone keyboard complaints in Hacker News. “This gets back to the idea of preventing frustration. I determined that it would be more frustrating to have autocorrection âguess wrongâ and erroneously fix broken typing.” Read the full thread. It is great, including the constallation algortihm…
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Getting a taste for making
Few years back, my brother and I decided to work on an iPhone app together. It was a little note taking app that I dreamt up to help me record lectures while taking notes. We gave it a terrible name⌠ânotes + uâ. App didnât make it. It wasnât a million dollar idea. We didnât…
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Late Night Internetsing
I painted this for my wife as a birthday presented. I really wanted to capture this very mundane observation that takes places so many nights… It’s late, tired from a long hours at work, half-consciously scrolling through reddit or YouTube, while fading away from the day. We happen to call this activity “internetsing” at home.…