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20 hours ago •
veekaybee
veekaybee
Updating list of favorite internet essays
My Favorite Essays
These are the most important essays I’ve read that have shaped my understanding of the online world and software development as a profession.
On the internet and people
| Essay Title | Author | Summary |
|---|---|---|
| The Tyranny of Structurelessness | Jo Freeman | Contrary to what we would like to believe, there is no such thing as a structureless group. Any group of people of whatever nature that comes together for any length of time for any purpose will inevitably structure itself in some fashion. |
| I Hate the News | Aaron Swartz | Reading the mainstream news doesn’t give us any benefits because we can’t act on it. We’re made to feel helpless. We’re better off reading a book. |
| A Group is Its Own Worst Enemy | Clay Shirky | Groups behave both as groups and as individuals, meaning that groups online are constantly in conflict with each other and themselves. |
| The Web is a Customer Service Medium | Paul Ford | “Why Wasn’t I Consulted” is an important question to ask when being online |
| I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately | Alice E. Marwick, danah Boyd | We have different contexts depending on which people we spend time with. The internet has erased that. |
| Reflections on the programming life | Ellen Ullman | What programming is like at the micro level |
| The Anaconda and the Chandelier | Perry Link | Why the threat of surveillance is scarier than actual surveillance |
| In Praise of the Flaneur | Bijan Stephen | Walking purposelessly around the internet is no longer an option |
| Woods+ | Paul Ford | It’s about Google+, but even more. |
| The Submarine | Paul Graham | How marketing and newspapers work |
| How Apple and Amazon Security Flaws Led to my Epic Hacking | Mat Honan | On Apple IDs and digital identity |
| You Have Two Jobs | Jacob Kaplan-Moss | At work, you need to be good at your job and be easy to work with. |
| The Wolf | Michael Lopp | What makes up a 10x developer |
| Talking about Large Lanugage Models | Murray Shanahan | The more adept LLMs become at mimicking human language, the more vulnerable we become to anthropomorphism, to seeing the systems in which they are embedded as more human-like than they really are. |
| The Engineering-Manager Pendulum | Charity Majors | You can switch between both in your career and that's mostly ok. |
| How to Ask Good Questions | Julia Evans | You have to research a problem before you need to seek out help |
| The B-Lane Swimmer | Holly Witteman | People of different skill levels behave differently to one another. |
On programming
| Essay Title | Author | Summary |
|---|---|---|
| Parse Don't Validate | Alexis King | What the title says |
| Statistical Modeling: The Two Cultures | Leo Breiman | There are people who create simple models via data and complex models via algorithms |
| Choose Boring Technology | Dan McKinley | What the title says |
| Grug Brained Developer | Grug | Complex is bad |
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