Betterment

It’s a funny thing about the irruption of bad news into your life. You figure it’ll be preceded by a sense of foreboding — an ominous, overcast sky; a pit in the stomach that won’t go away. Instead, tragedy arrives amidst balmy, sunshine-soaked weather, after a pleasurable run, right before stepping into the couldn’t-be-more-routine shower. […]

Not having enough time, enough people, or enough money is actually a good thing! Embrace it!

Today's Full Stack Journey podcast explores an IT career journey with guest Tracy Holmes. Tracy shares lessons she's learned on an IT voyage that includes engineering, data centers, and developer advocacy. Lessons include how to protect your time, why it's useful to say no sometimes, and the importance of learning how to learn.

Here’s what’s easy to find: Multiple choice plus effort plus persistence. We’ve been trained since birth to look for small, do-able tasks with boundaries. It seems as though our e…

A deeper look at one of the most comprehensive and research-backed theories of how we learn complicated skills.

You live in the big here. Wherever you live, your tiny spot is deeply intertwined within a larger place, imbedded fractal-like into a whole system called a watershed, which is itself integrated with other watersheds into a tightly interdependent biome.

Sometimes all you need to make peace with your partner is some helpful tech and a collaborative approach.

It’s not the “gold.” It’s the “rush” that changes the way people behave. When consumed by a gold rush, people make decisions that they would never make on ordina…

It doesn’t have to last all day–it could be for an hour or even a month. How would you celebrate it? Who else needs to be part of it? It’s a symbol, a marker, a chance for convers…

According to the Hebrew Bible, when the Israelites got to complaining about their wilderness wanderings, God sent fiery serpents among them as punishment. Expiring from the serpents’ venomous bites, the people repented, and beseeched Moses to pray for a remedy to the plague. In response, God told the prophet to put a bronze serpent on […]

I’m writing this in the evening, on a laptop resting on a work board my kid bought me for Xmas. The board is actually intended for tablets, and has a long slot so you can prop the tablet up, …

The customer service from the freight shipping company that came to my home a few months ago was truly terrible. Not simply a lack of care, but an aggressive embrace of uncaring. Every interaction …

Women are increasingly playing the role of best friend, lover, and on-call therapist to their male partners.

Groups rarely say this. They often (and loudly) state “we are right,” but when the future arrives, and it always does, it’s not surprising that it turns out that many projections …

Whether you’re hunting wild boar at night, taking a moonlit walk through the woods, running some kind of covert operation, or simply trying to find the bathroom in an unfamiliar house or hotel, it can be advantageous to be able to see well in the dark. You could fire up a flashlight to accomplish that […]

When it comes to fitness, people tend to either focus on endurance or strength; they’re runners or powerlifters. But wouldn’t it be pretty cool to be able to deadlift 500 pounds and run a marathon? My guest says that combining real strength with true endurance to become a “hybrid athlete” isn’t only possible, it also […]

This is the dilemma that every game designer, form creator and teacher faces. Writing an instruction manual, doing a survey, creating a map–they’re all difficult tasks because of the tr…

Coming down the empty road, you can see the light from a ways off. It’s been green for awhile, which means it’s due to turn red soon. Should you speed up, so you can make it through bef…

In letters men exchanged in the 18th and 19th centuries, they referred to one another as “bosom friends,” exulted in their “eternal” and “ardent” attachment, and affirmed that even when apart, “my heart is knit with thine.” In photographs from the same era, men hold hands, sit on each other’s laps, and wrap their arms […]

I faced down three attackers in my living room last night. I used a knife on the first one, grabbed his pistol and fired on the second, then...

It’s not too late to restart your software development career at 40

Research shows how eliminating the familiar can instantly reveal a broader array of potential solutions.

Posted on Friday 28 Jan 2022. 874 words, 6 links. By Matt Webb.

At first glance, it makes sense to avoid a crowded market. Better to sell your services or your products in a place where you’re the only one. But crowded markets also have lots of customers.…

As we approach the halfway mark of winter, have you found your commitment to the exercise habit waning? When the days are cold, dark, and gray, it can be hard to stay motivated to work out, especially if your fitness practice takes place outside. When it’s 20 degrees and overcast, you may not feel in […]

Has this ever been done before? Why not? Did it work? Why not? If it’s new and useful, what problem is it solving? Why has the audience rejected similar innovations in the past? One day, this…

Why do we fail to use so many of the subjects we learn in school? Are they useless, or do we simply fail to learn them well enough?

Modern apps have been engineered to capture your attention. We explore how to break free and find more focus for your own programming.

Josh Butts, CTO of Ziff Media Group, talks one-on-ones: how to get the most out of your face time, why 1:1s are important, and what not to use them for.