My favourite tweets

12 Jan 2018 in Odds and Ends

I recently took some time to read through all of my starred tweets (yes starred, not liked) and decided to pull out my favourites so that I can find them again easily in the future.

Of them all, my favourite is this one from Sarah Mei which really nails the purpose of management for me.

Most people see management as an authority role, but it's not. It's a service role.

-- Sarah Mei (@sarahmei) February 17, 2017

Thoughts

We had some tweets that were a little deeper than others. Mark Kirschstein shared something that I try and remember when I'm working on something that isn't quite there yet.

My thought for the new year is to keep reminding myself that 'perfect is the enemy of better'

-- Mark Kirschstein (@markkirschstein) December 30, 2011

Sadly, Shaun Inman has proven to us all that time travel will never be invented in our life time.

I know time travel will never be invented in my lifetime because I haven't come back to remind myself to buy 2 of all my favorite t-shirts.

-- Shaun Inman (@shauninman) May 30, 2014

Then there's something we can all relate to from Dan Sumption

Sumption's law: the earlier one gets up, the longer one spends arsing about on a computer, and consequently the later one arrives at work.

-- Dan Sumption͚͛͛͛͛͛🥀 (@dansumption) January 6, 2011

Tech

Moving on to tech, I found that I seem to have a soft spot for DNS related jokes

"There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things."

With that in mind, let me introduce you to DNS.

-- David McBride (@dwm) June 13, 2017

Why do people find DNS so difficult? It’s just cache invalidation and naming things.

-- Jeff Waugh (@jdub) June 4, 2016

Gareth L reminds us that even professionals aren't infallible when it comes to server configuration

That moment when you could have sworn you wrote some awesome daemonization for something only to find it running in a while loop in a screen

-- Gareth L (@NetworkString) September 17, 2013

Straw men

It's good to be reminded that things aren't as simple as they first seem sometimes. Like this post from John Cutler on why we make tickets (Hint: it's not to show managers that we're busy)

Just clearing this up ...

Why we make tickets pic.twitter.com/oVe0soRMeQ

-- John Cutler (@johncutlefish) May 3, 2017

You'll regularly hear "I could build that in a weekend!" on sites like Hacker News, but there's generally a lot more involved than what you see when building something of moderate complexity. Take this flow chart that Slack use to decide where to send a notification, for example:

When Hacker News commenters say "I could build that app in a weekend!" I think of this chart of how Slack decides to send a notification.

Flow Chart

-- ᎷᎪᎢᎢ ᎻᎪᏌᏩᎻᎬY (@mathowie) March 3, 2017

Infographics

Understanding logical fallacies and being aware of cognitive biases are things that will improve your life. These are great infographics to get you started:

We're not as smart as we think we are. If you internalize this, you'll be a step ahead. Great poster on logical fallacies. pic.twitter.com/Od2EXzmKCN

-- Trevor Pirtle (@TrevorPirtle) March 2, 2017

Know your cognitive biases - https://t.co/CaTwBUcrd1 Beautifully collated and presented by John Manoonigam III pic.twitter.com/ThN90tYh3l

-- Troy Magennis (@t_magennis) July 19, 2017

Humour

Then of course, we have humorous tweets.

I'm sad to admit that my Fitbit scales have also thought I was a guest after I was too afraid to use them for a while

When you put on so much Christmas Weight™ your #Fitbit scales say “Guest”. 😐

-- anthony.yaml (@anthonysterling) January 1, 2016

Yep. Alcohol poisoning is definitely on the cards (if you've not seen Dexter, I'd highly recommend it).

If there was a Dexter drinking game where I had a shot every time Deb said "Fuck", I'd have alcohol poisoning.

-- Snook (@snookca) January 1, 2013

There's no denying it, if they were a unicorn, you'd definitely be dead.

She places her forehead on my chest, pauses thoughtfully, then says, “If I was a unicorn, you’d be dead.”

-- Ethan Marcotte (@beep) May 1, 2011

I've happily never experienced getting a debit card out of the floppy drive, but I can totally see how it happened.

Thinking back to the first time I ever bought something online. Took me a while to get my debit card out of the floppy drive :s

-- Anna Debenham (@anna_debenham) January 21, 2011

Another one from Ethan Marcotte, this time on his family's inclination to dive in to controversial topics

My family doesn’t so much steer around conversational land mines as strap them to their chest before running around looking for hugs.

-- Ethan Marcotte (@beep) June 12, 2010

Then to round it all off, our only reply of the bunch. Sam asks why Windows doesn't have a package manager, and Ben sets him straight

@borntyping it does it's called Steam.

-- Ben Gray (@benjamg) April 15, 2014

Martin Rue

For some reason I seem to like a disproportionate percentage of Martin's tweets, meaning he gets an entire section to himself! Here are some of my favourites:

Dear tomorrow morning, I've just had a good idea that I must act on immediately, please don't hate me.

-- Martin (@martinrue) January 3, 2013

There was no milk in the office so I went to buy some. Now I’m eating a cookie. Everything in the middle is a blur.

-- Martin (@martinrue) May 26, 2015

Somebody stopped me to ask for directions to the train station to catch a train to Stoke. I almost lied to do them a favour.

-- Martin (@martinrue) April 4, 2015

I think horses are pulling this train. Maybe just a horse, or a large dog.

-- Martin (@martinrue) October 14, 2011

The original

Finally, the original from Anna Debenham. I still use this to explain what I do to people who ask what my job is.

Trying to explain to old school friends what I do. I'm a front end developer... I make, like, websites... fuck it, I'm an astronaut.

-- Anna Debenham (@anna_debenham) June 19, 2009

It really works - why not give it a try?