My friends call me Bam

22 Jan 2025

I just deactivated my account and deleted Twitter/X. I wish I could drop Meta products but Instagram, WhatsApp and facebook marketplace are things I have no substitute for. I don’t know how we can stop these corrupt assholes, but I’m going to at least decrease my usage…

My friends call me Bam reposted

Yana Welinder

@yanaw.bsky.social

6 Dec 2024

AI is fundamentally transforming the role of PMs 🧵 Here’s how it’s playing out based on Kraftful’s experience with 50,000+ product teams. AI is freeing product teams to focus on creative, high-impact work. But here’s the big shift: The traditional role of product managers? It’s going away.

3 Dec 2024

All pants should have pockets, and all pockets should have zippers.

2 Dec 2024

I'm working with someone who writes emails to me as they're working... so they will say "I think I know what to do, give me a minute" and then a new paragraph "Ok, I'm back I figured it out." It goes on like this for hours of work... 🤣 By far one of my favorite collaborators.

My friends call me Bam reposted

25 Nov 2024

Sunday night reminder: if you’re dreading Monday, you need a change.

1/ August 16, 2013 For 5 minutes, all of Google’s services—including Search, Gmail, YouTube, and Drive—went offline. Yes, even Google Search was inaccessible. For millions of users worldwide, it felt like the internet itself had stopped working.

9/ This isn’t just a Google problem. Other outages have disrupted the internet, including: AWS: Taking down websites like Netflix and Reddit. Facebook (2021): A 6-hour global outage affecting billions of users. Each time, the world asks: Are we too dependent on Big Tech?

10/ The 2013 Google outage was short but impactful. It wasn’t just a tech glitch—it was a reminder of how deeply these platforms are woven into our daily lives. Are we too reliant on Google and other tech giants? Has anything changed or gotten better in the past decade?

7/ For users, the outage was a wake-up call. It raised questions like: Are we too reliant on a few tech giants? What happens if a longer outage occurs? Should we diversify our tools and services?

8/ For Google, it was a stark reminder of the stakes. Even 5 minutes of downtime could lead to millions in losses—and damage to its reputation. Since then, the company has invested heavily in improving uptime and redundancy.

5/ The cause of the outage? Google never publicly revealed all the details, but it was attributed to an internal server configuration issue—a mistake on their end. It wasn’t a hack or external attack, but a simple internal error with massive consequences.

6/ This event underscored a major lesson: The fragility of centralized systems. When a company as massive as Google has a hiccup, it sends shockwaves across the globe. From lost revenue to interrupted communication, the ripple effects were enormous.

3/ For Google, this was a financial nightmare. At the time, Google was earning $108 million per day. That’s roughly $500,000 per minute. In just 5 minutes, the outage likely cost Google $2.5 million.

4/ The outage also highlighted just how dependent the internet is on Google. Search: The world’s largest search engine. YouTube: Global media hub. Gmail: Used by businesses and individuals globally. Drive: Critical for file sharing and collaboration. When these go down, everything stops.

2/ What happened during those 5 minutes? • Global internet traffic dropped by 40%. • Productivity ground to a halt for businesses and individuals. • People started Googling (ironically, on other search engines) to figure out what was going on.

1/ Azer Koçulu, an open-source developer, maintained a tiny JavaScript package called left-pad. It had one job: add padding to the left of a string. The code was just 11 lines long. Simple, right? But here’s where it gets crazy…

8/ The incident sparked huge debates in the tech community about: Dependency management: Why did so many projects rely on such a tiny package? Open-source sustainability: Should developers be compensated for their work? Power dynamics: How platforms handle disputes like this.

9/ This wasn’t just about code—it was a wake-up call. The left-pad incident showed the fragility of the software we take for granted. Sometimes, it’s not billion-dollar systems that keep the internet running. It’s 11 lines of code written by one person.

6/ Companies like Meta, Netflix, Spotify, and yes, even Kik, depended on these tools. When left-pad disappeared, everything broke. Builds failed. Apps crashed. Developers everywhere panicked.

7/ The npm team scrambled to fix the chaos. They ended up restoring the left-pad package themselves, a rare and controversial move in the open-source world. But for a few hours, one developer broke the internet… with 11 lines of code.

4/ In protest, Koçulu decided to delete all his packages from npm—including left-pad. He even wrote a resignation note: “I don’t want to be part of an ecosystem where corporates can buy open-source projects just because they have lawyers.”

5/ Turns out, left-pad wasn’t just a tiny package nobody cared about. It was a dependency for huge libraries like Babel, Webpack, React, and React Native—tools critical to the JavaScript ecosystem. Translation: large portions of the internet relied on it.

2/ Koçulu also owned another npm package name: kik. Enter Kik Messenger, the company. They wanted the kik name for themselves and reached out to Koçulu, asking for it. He refused. Then things escalated.

3/ The conversation turned ugly. Allegedly, Kik called him a “dick” during the dispute. npm (the platform where these packages live) stepped in—and sided with Kik, forcibly transferring ownership of the package name. Koçulu was furious. What did he do next?

28 Nov 2024

Ah, the annual 6 Weeks of Indulgence begins! Directly undoing all health and fitness progress I've made in the year. A beautiful cycle.

26 Nov 2024

Initial reactions after 2 days on Bluesky: - APP: It's great. It feels like Twitter 10+ years ago. Simple, clean, fast, intuitive. - DISCOVERY: I'm having a very hard time finding people to follow. I'm searching for feeds and topics, but not finding much (e.g. tech, startups, global citizenship)

@drdeanburnett.bsky.social

26 Nov 2024

Also, I'm surprised how much Twitter/X posts get re-shared here. It seems like there's some weird shadowing of that platform here. Lastly, the pervasive anxiety and negativity around political discourse remains. Very disenchanted here from what I've seen so far.

My friends call me Bam reposted

Dr Dean Burnett

26 Nov 2024

Phones aren't necessarily as bad for children as we think, says Welsh brain expert www.walesonline.co.u... An article about the scaremongering about how smartphones etc affect young people. By me. To help promote my book, obvs: amzn.eu/d/8C5KlOR

walesonline.co.ukPhones aren't necessarily as bad for children as we think, says brain expertDr Dean Burnett, who has spent years studying the brain and how it works, he has written a new book delivering some news that not everyone may want to hear

25 Nov 2024

Sunday night reminder: if you’re dreading Monday, you need a change.

24 Nov 2024

Less is more. But complexity is valued. The larger the organization, the more complexity ‘feels’ necessary.

SwiftOnSecurity@swiftonsecurity.com

One of the greatest values you can provide to an employer is saying No. To have experience to know what's important. If we don't log this thing we will have more retention of what matters MORE, longer. The real world has costs, and those have to be paid.

24 Nov 2024

Does anyone else experience the Sunday torment of wanting to get a lot done, wanting to do nothing, and then realizing you have 2 young kids and therefore no agency in the matter?

23 Nov 2024

I just started a complete 'personal daily tech reboot.' Trying Arc browser, Hey for email, Basecamp for task management, Bluesky for news/social. After 15 years of Chrome, Gmail, Twitter it really feels like tools with completely new perspectives. Anyone else? #arcbrowser #hey #bluesky