Week in Review 2022-09-05

This week was full on work. Currently I am part of a team developing a web app in Django, it has been really interesting to learn more about Django and thinking of different users journeys and cases. I am working with an incredible team and learning a lot from them.

On the personal projects, the automation of these blog posts worked 🎉 and now the posts are created automatically using GitHub Actions. I’m working on a post explaining how I am managing it and opening the script that is used for this. The next steps for the web:

• Improve the design of the blog
• Add more previous projects to the projects section
• Write more content

Besides work, this past week had a lot of friends and family, it’s always nice to catch-up with people while enjoying the last bits of good weather in Amsterdam.

Twitter

• 🛫 A thread by Timothy Gowers, on having a rule of thumb on estimating the amount of harm that would result from various carbon-emitting activities. // Quite interesting to read it and understand the different implications and future harm of the decisions we take today.
• 🧑‍⚕️ David Robinson’s thread on the story of Belding Scribner, a pioneer in AI ethics // As part of David’s promotion for his upcoming book, this thread narrates the story of Belding Scribner a doctor that started involving the general public to make technical decisions and share the moral microphone with an ethics committee. Interesting to think how, apparently at the time, small decisions have had such great impact.

Youtube

• 🌎 The wall street journal on the technology behind google maps. // Although a little bit on the optimistic side on Google Maps, it was interesting to watch. There’s a lot of interesting questions about the data Google uses for the maps, what role do we play as users, and the biases we incorporate into maps (Who gets mapped? When do we get map? What places are not mapped?).

Web

• 🕵️ Undeclared pools in France uncovered by AI technology // An interesting approach in France to detect undeclared pools and other undeclared building extensions. While the municipality can collect more taxes, I found more interesting the application to protect the water of the region (or any given region). This approaches will become more and more important to cope with climate change and droughts.
• 🗓 Paul Graham’s Maker’s Schedule post // Claudio shared me this knowledge pearl, in which Graham argues that there are two main ways to manage time, for managers they operate by cutting the work-day in hours, while for maker it usually by half-day units, providing enough time to do complex tasks. This quote resonated with me:

For someone on the maker’s schedule, having a meeting is like throwing an exception. It doesn’t merely cause you to switch from one task to another; it changes the mode in which you work.

• 🏃‍♂️ Marathon du Médoc // A marathon that is run in between vineyards, with orchestras playing along the route, wine tasting stops, and oyster and stake tasting. This sounds like a fun run!

🤖 This post was generated automatically by the weekly script, using content curated in the issues of my repo in GitHub