It was the first snow of the season in New York City last night! Today the sun is shining, so we’ll see how long it actually sticks around for.

I’ve got fewer articles than normal this week in the newsletter — I spent more time than normal reading actual, gosh-darned novels! Taking even more inspriation from Arne Bahlo I might start writing up longer reviews of books I read.

Books

• A Deepness in the Sky (Vernor Vinge): This was a classic space opera that tackled some interesting political and moral themes. Vinge was a computer science professor, and one of my favorite parts of the book was the description of “programmer-archaeologist”: thousands of years after the death of Moore’s Law, all software for all tasks has already been written by someone, somewhere — the job of a programmer is mostly to decode and tweak old software rather than create new things.

• Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (Gabrielle Zevin): It’s a novel about love, life, and video games. The descriptions of how the technical and creative process intersect with the human and interpersonal story of the main characters was really great. I think this will take the cake for my favorite book of 2024.

Blogs

• The Secret Inside One Million Checkboxes (Nolen Royalty): After discovering Nolen’s blog a few weeks ago I’ve devoured all his entries. This story stood out to me as showcasing the Internet at its best.

• I’ve had a change of heart regarding employee metrics (Rachel by the Bay): Flipping the script on productivity metrics really clicked with me. I can’t say it better than the article itself:

  It’s the job of a manager to know what their reports are up to, and whether they’re doing a good job of it, and are generally effective. If they can’t do that, then they themselves are ineffective, and *that* is the sort of thing that is the responsibility of THEIR manager, and so on up the line.

  From this vantage point, the logical conclusion of the belief that productivity can be reduced to commit frequency or lines of code written is that people management itself should be automated away.

• The Best Emacs Microfeature (Fernando Boretti): fill-paragraph a small thing, but one way to describe Emacs is just a collection of tiny building blocks that all can work together.

• Advent of Code in Zig (Loris Cro): A tour of Zig through the lens of Advent of Code. I doubt this is acutal content marketing, but if it was, I’d say this is some of the most effective content marketing you can do.

• ”Rules” that terminal programs follow (Julia Evans): From one perspective UX is the collection of conventions we carry around with us as we interact with the digital and physical worlds.