David's Raging Nexus

41/246 - What Surgeons Can Learn from Polar Explorers and Fighter Pilots

david@ragingnexus.com (David Ramalho) — Sat, 09 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

What Surgeons Can Learn from Polar Explorers and Fighter Pilots

Trauma surgery, combat flying and polar exploration require professionals to work in risky conditions where error can lead to catastrophe. One key skill is recognising when a situation is getting out of control and finding a ‘place of safety’; another is to learn from mistakes without allowing self-confidence to be destroyed.

This lecture explores how high-risk professionals can share insights relevant to medicine, helping clinicians to develop essential skills.

With Phil Bayman (combat pilot) and Dougal Goodman (polar explorer).

First off this lecture is very much focused on real-time performance, where you have to make decisions and take action on the fly. You find this in many professional settings with varying degree of consequence and risk, surgery - and specifically in the case of Roger Kneebone, Trauma Surgery - performance on situations of high risk, high consequence, incomplete information.

There’s quite a bit in this that I think it’s worth listening to as it transfers nicely. For me while the vast majority of my time is spent planning and developing in a controlled, simulated and completely replaceable and reproducible environment, there are a few occasions where I’m in analogous scenarios - minus the risk of life to me or others.

Scenarios like:

Certain maintenance or refactor deploys that perform deeper changes to the software or infrastructure
Emergent system failures due to infrastructure or external actor issues
Launch days, either of whole products or certain events or features that meant all your code is actually in place but it hasn’t been triggered or accessible yet

These are actually some of my favorite moments in my job as it’s all about skill, situational awareness and cool heads, which probably plays to our lizard brain enough that it actually triggers raised awareness and all those fight or flight mechanisms. I’m also grateful I get to balance those with the more contemplative bits of work, because it really does drain you, so I can imagine certain professions like that of a Surgeon must take an immense toll on people.

Another interesting bit of the lecture that resonated with me after 20 something years working is sort of this breakdown of how your journey through mastering of an art / skill / profession looks like

I now recognize clearly those steps and where I shifted from one to the other and it’s helpful to visualize it like this, either as a map or a historical record depending on where in the journey you are .

This is another interesting aspect of team work - in this case specifically of surgical teams but that, again, can translate to other scenarios too. As each member is focused on something, the whole picture is hard to assess and critical information can at times be dismissed or not be passed on. In scenarios where you’re dealing with sometime in real-time, this increases the risk.

The other thing that they talk about at length and that I also felt throughout my work life is that sometimes it’s crucial that you buy yourself time to make the right decisions. Usually this is accomplished not by delaying decision making, but by accurately finding the best decision that while not committing yourself irrevocably, does address any emerging problem while giving you time to think about the wider picture.

The two examples given demonstrate this very nicely. One was where during a Emergency Trauma Surgery Roger removed a blood clot only to have blood gushing from an artery and instead of clipping the artery - which I assume comes with damage or is prone to error - he used cloth to clean the area and remove the blood, thus stopping the hemorrhage long enough for him to make a plan in his head. The other example was related to a landing Phil was making where he went through all the standard procedures - or so he thought - only to realize prior to committing to the landing that the landing gear wasn’t deployed, instead of deploying there and then Phil decided to throttle up and gain altitude in order to reassess what had happened with him to fail that critical step as that could be a signal that he was missing other things as well.

There are other examples and lessons, like the anecdotal case of ER Doctors looking at X-Rays of someone involved in a accident and upon seeing one fracture they think they’ve found what they wanted, only to actually miss other fractures that were also present and visible.

It’s an hour long lecture but an interesting one, the link above will give you history and the presentation slides, but you can also see the whole thing just bellow.

41/224 - 2020 in Review

david@ragingnexus.com (David Ramalho) — Fri, 18 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

2020 in review

The other day someone was going through their own review of 2020 and all I could think was “wait, we’re actually considering the possibly of 2020 coming to an end?” but also, “I should probably do one of those, for future memory”. And so it is that we’re here, doing just that, or trying to.

Before I go in to what’s definitely going to be a dark account, I want to write down why I’m doing this and what I hope to achieve as everyone has a 2020 story to tell - or ten - and me, personally, David the Human, really really can’t complain if we do the math of: all my arms and legs are accounted for, I don’t have health issues that I know off, I’m not worse off financially and I’ve got some paths for me to explore in 2021.

But still, all the events here are relevant, one especially so and I want to put them down in writing, saved in a file across a few servers in the hope that this - My Dear Diary - resists and that I can come back to it some day, or my kids, or a friend, or someone I haven’t met yet that might take some value of my experiences - or aliens!

So the things I want to achieve here are:

Practice writing, I don’t always have something to tell so it’s good to take advantage of the opportunity
Crystallise my memories in this particular shape and form - not in pixel perfect shape, but in whatever way I remember things now. I hear this is good practice as well.

1. Bacteria be gone

Had I a habit of writing I would have, at the very least, a post called “2019 in Review” and in it, I would have a section called “Welcome, the entire Bacterial Population”.

Now, that section would start with …

London, September 30th 2019: Had a great meeting, we know the product we built in and out and these demos always turn out great and people are impressed. Dinner was lovely too, they took us out to a nice restaurant, I had <something that I really don’t remember right now>, had a very large beer and we took the taxi to the hotel near the airport as we had flights in the morning.

I settled into the hotel room and put the kettle on. Wifi was - as per Hotel Standards - only there in name, so I went to bed and turned on the TV to enjoy some good old UK programming. I started to feel cold, and noticed the window was open, so I closed that and turned on the heater.

Funny, I am colder still, as in, shivering, but I’m also sweating, this is very unpleasant, I’ll try to get some sleep.

I can’t get seem to be able to sleep on account of all this vigorous shivering my body is performing surely, for my self-entertainment. I also feel sort of an urge to go to the bathroom but I better get this shivering under control.

Never mind that, I’ll go to the bathroom them. Oh what’s this, pain like that of knifes suddenly teleporting somewhere into my insides, how quaint. And what’s this, blood and other gooey bits coming out of me, oh boy, and I thought the meeting was the highlight of my day, I’m so glad I bought the All Night Entertainment package.

Suddenly it’s morning and I have my flight, better take a shower and gently exfoliate the remainings of the evening. It’s interesting that each step I take is accompanied by some mild pain, which is good as it makes walking less boring. After breakfast and some pills offered by a concerned co-worker that seemed to have confused my name with “Oh My God You About As Pale as Hell Irish People In General What’s Wrong With You” - my name is David by the way, I really didn’t understand the confusion, but I went with it - I set off to walk over to the airport, passing by a Pink Tesla Y that I surely looked on the outside how I felt on the inside, very confused but eager to show off.

The Airport was nice, I got to sit and walk and visit the Pins and Needles Room - or Bathroom as we normally call it . I saw Jeremy Irons, I swear I did, and that was nice, and with that I settled into the airplane and left London heading south this time, instead of West. The plane landed nicely and I followed all the nice people and arrows pointing to places over to where I would collect the car, where my wife met me and she also confused my name with something longer and involving questions and then she drove me to the hospital, where a number of things happened and medicine was given with instructions, that all felt nice so I went to sleep.

A week later .. no, sorry, a month later, it happened again, almost exactly like it did before, by sheer coincidence on the same day I stopped taking the month long dose of antibiotics. How odd, better ask the experts then. Oh you see, that antibiotic might not have been the most suited, here take this one instead while we run the tests again, so I did, and I knew I remembered that name when I started to notice a rash on my skin, it’s the same one that had given me a rash decades before, so I went to the hospital to try to get them to swap for something less rashy, please sir!

As luck would have it, there I was waiting for the doctor to call me again when I get an email from another doctor at the same hospital, something in the lines of “URGENT PLEASE HEAD OVER TO THE EMERGENCY ROOM”. And I thought, well this is convenient given I’m here already, let’s go find this doctor then, so I went, and she was very nice in explaining how none of the antibiotics would work on this new bacteria the same way it did on the first one - seems like I was having a party down there - and so I would need hospital grade antibiotics and she wanted me to stay for the duration, but there were no rooms and she would have to direct me somewhere else. Well, but can I take them in the hospital and go home after? Well, I suppose you can, but you have to buy them and come back here every single day for at least 15 days, so I said Yes and we all rejoiced.

30 days later and whatever works out at 100 something Euros a dose, my arms fully versed in the art of having needles permanently attached to them and with me finally finding a place to read a book for one hour each day undisturbed the bacteria seemed to be doing very well, so this other nice doctor that I had since started seeing was scratching his head and asking loads of questions and asking me to pee into a bucket with a timer to see what world records I would break. Upon which he said “ah-ha, Eureka” and we all rejoiced, and then he said he would have to insert tubes and cameras into my no-no parts and I rejoiced slightly less.

So THAT happened and it was every bit as nice as it sounds, especially the part where he said - right, plan B, we need the rigid metallic tubes and the cutting bits - oh how we all laughed there in that tiny room, me pantless, the floor bloody and the nurse seeing me at my absolute best - we did, or I did, I swear I laughed all the way through it, and when it was all over I had earned a new toy. A little bag attached to me, via a tube, which meant I could play computer games for hours and hours without ever having to go to the bathroom and a date with the surgery room in two weeks time.

Oh how fun it all was but by Christmas time I was done, I had done it all and after another comedic moment whereupon a nice gentleman thought he was dressing a wound only to find out he was removing a tube from within me, which he did and we all rejoiced and I went home, a new man, with the urinating power of a fire hydrant and life was looking up again.

Except I woke up a couple of days later with a fever and everything started again and there wasn’t much rejoicing, but instead some tests were done as quickly as some bacteria can be nursed into a nice bunch and then scientifically analysed. I held my breath when they call, as I wasn’t looking forward to hearing my Antibiotic Resistant friend was, indeed, resistant to antibiotics, so when they named my tenant and I found out it was in fact a NEW one, there was mild rejoicing, followed by - more - antibiotics, and suddenly it was February and I stopped taking antibiotics and ………. it held. I was once again, master of my domain!

By then I thought, well, at least 2020 is starting to look up, 2019 was really nasty.

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH

2. A World Pandemic

Fresh out of my own predicament, news started making the rounds that a weird pneumonia like disease was hitting China in a non trivial way. And by the time we collectively finished saying the words “ahhh that’ll never come all the way here” governments were ordering lockdowns, closing down schools and generally checking calendars to confirm that, in fact, it’s been just over 100 years since the Spanish Flu pandemic, so we’re due a new one.

As you can expect, as someone working full time in a company operating on the online Accommodation Business, I had some reservations — only to see them all cancelled thus reverting all revenue from the previous months and obliterating almost all future revenue and with it, minor things like, site traffic, tea and cookies, office space, pay checks, full heads of hair, etc.

We of course reacted quickly, we grabbed kitchen and / or gardening utensils and proceeded to cut all costs we could possibly cut, stopping at the point where we have a functional web application, continue to provide customer support - and by then there was a lot of it - and give us a fighting chance for the future.

With all boxes ticked, it was left for each of us to individual deal with the aftermath and with the fact that all our salaries took a hit. So each of us went away to deal with it, and I dealt with it by working both my butt and my head off from that point on by taking on a second, large enough, project.

3. My heart was broken and forever incomplete

By now it’s July and the kids needed a break from all day home, to all day home but with a nicer view. We decided to drive south for a week, or two, we would see, so we packed everything and set off. Before leaving my phone lost access to the network, seemed like my number (Irish) was having a hard time with the Roaming service and I assumed it would just be a temporary thing. Just before leaving my wife got a text from the nursing home where my mother was - this was a huge part of 2019 and why it was such a crappy year, but I’ll leave that for another time - where they told us that she was having some very mild respiratory symptoms and given everything that was happening they felt it was better to take her to the hospital, but it was all routine and we shouldn’t worry, a couple of days would do it.

I’ll add a note here, for memory sake, remembering that in February my mom was taken to a hospital in Lisbon, and for a while it looked like there might be a solution to the neurological problems. I visited her every day, she had some lumbar punctures done, fluid drained and we were hopeful, but in the end she came back, tired and as she was before, only to see the Pandemic roll in and visits being forbidden. I saw her once or twice since, from afar …

So we settled in to our “vacation spot”, I of course brought my work with me but the kids at least could go to the beach and relax a bit in a different set. I couldn’t really complain as the temperature was nicer and having the cool breeze come in from the sea really balances things out. We phoned every day to the hospital, by then there were no visits of course, and they told us she had a little bit of pneumonia and she was taking antibiotics but was doing well, eating well and generally ok. This went on for a few days, every call the news was similar, she’s doing well, all is good.

Then on Saturday we called again, my wife called because she had built a repertoire with the nurses and we couldn’t really speak to my mother, so it was the same, but this time her tone of voice dropped and she said “sorry, can you explain what you just said” and I knew things weren’t well, and it wasn’t going fine and everything was not ok. By then they told us she had taken a sharp turn to the worse, breathing was extremely hard and there was nothing they could do but provide “comfort measures”. Everything sank and the next day, when the phone rang around 6am, no words were necessary, the woman that brought me to life and that was a part of me forever had left and my life would go on from that day without her.

We packed and drove back home, and I had a new project in hand - taking care of all the bureaucracy, funeral, taxes, banks, but most of all, MOST of all, prepare the rest of my fathers life, a man who had lost the daily presence of my mother for a little over a year and now lost everything…

I worked almost every day,I worked on the day my mother was cremated and we said out last goodbyes, I never stopped, I really couldn’t stop as a deadline was looming over and the team really couldn’t get it over without me, but mostly I worked so I didn’t have to think and that, sadly, worked.

We had a year to prepare - not for this, this was completely unexpected and came out of the blue - but we had a year to get used to the fact that my mother was entering another stage of her life, too soon, too fast, too helplessly and there’s nothing good here, there’s no moral to this story - maybe a couple of cautionary tales, but definitely no moral - and as I read through some of my moms notes and books, as I read how happy she was to visit us in Dublin and seeing how we were, how happy she was that Sara and the kids would be coming back with me following after only to have shit after shit event come down and ruin everything is one of life’s little injustices that only reflects that there’s no narrative to life, there’s only context, opportunity and life changing events until one day there’s nothing.

This is the single most sad event in my life and sadly we all know it’s just the beginning.

4. Plans delayed

With all this and all that’s going on, the plans I had have by now, been all severely affected. None having come to fruition, all necessary steps having collapsed one way or another, so if I take anything from 2020 - well, it’s exactly the same I took after 2008 when bankruptcy was imminent and I had to shift gears - plans are fragile, hopeful things.

Nothing is done until it’s actually done and strategy falls apart and is replaced by pure tactic and sheer willpower. Be ok with letting go, learn to deal with frustration, do whatever you have to do to keep things afloat and buy yourself time to get back to a place where plans can once again be made. I’ve been forced to use this recipe more often that I would have liked by now, I keep saying that “I fail where others succeed” and while I say it half-joking, I can also look at certain key points in my life where left turns could have been right turns and everything might have been different and while I generally deal well with frustration, it has also changed me, in ways that I don’t necessarily appreciate.

I’ve become distant, cold. I have difficulty relating to people, engaging with people. I was never a small talk person, but I’ve done so much focusing and heavy prioritisation in my life to accommodate all the workload and emotional stability I’ve been stripped of all non-essencial conversation.

Lately I’ve been contrasting myself with my long term business partner, we went through the same things, we both made sacrifices, we both had to deal with threats and potential loss of property and while people are fascinated when he tells it, they seem uninterested or annoyed when I tell it. Which is not necessarily odd, he practices public speaking, he’s naturally outspoken and has no issues expressing feelings, wants and even showing fragility when required, while I’ve become a professional Stoic Block of Salt and I assume that reflects a bit :)

I guess if there’s any New Year Resolution is that I might need to pick a different outfit, possibly Stoic Block of Ice would be a nice improvement, at least it doesn’t suck away all the humidity around me.

I’ll practice, I’ll use Twitter - what I call The Wrong Tool for This Job - as a litmus test to how well I’m doing in the category of “Human Interaction”. That is my plan and I welcome you to help the hell out of me in this endeavour, here, I’ll apply some Digital Marketing to this and name the hash tag #MakeDavidHumanAgain the official tag line for this - not to be confused with David from Prometheus (or is it?)

41/10 - 500M Shades of gray

david@ragingnexus.com (David Ramalho) — Mon, 18 May 2020 00:00:00 +0100

Foreword

Despite the tone of the post - how else can I say things without saying them? - all is fine, I’m breathing, earning, working and I got a crash course on “it’s but a flesh wound” - so no action required - thank you though :).

I will complain a lot offering very little in the way of solutions, as one does when he’s just letting it all out .. you’ve been warned

Our Scheduled Program

It’s now safe to say that Q2 2020 has had a strong performance in the “Screw up everything” segment. Building on previous efforts lead by “My mom now requires a nursing home” and “The 4 Month Infection”, the community project “Global Pandemic” found the perfect environment on which to grow.

This has affected the entire globe and I hesitate to give my 1/7.594 billionth account, but why have a blog if you’re not being personal in it, right? Anyway, in no particular order a list of ways I’m being affected.

The economy - specifically for me the accommodation segment - tanked over the course of a few weeks.

I celebrated my 9 month CTO promotion with very interesting conversations and work around cost-cutting and long term uncertainty.

The work part was productive and we’ve made infrastructural changes that ensure we stand a fighting chance to weather this very hard setback, but it’s not without its costs.

Part of the cost-cutting measures is a partial layoff. The cons are easy enough - starting with less money at the end of the month - but some of the pros aren’t working on me as expected. For the first few weeks, I worked irrespective of the layoff - this quiet time is great to work on getting your dependencies up to speed for instance, so I worked on that.

I tried to take the time for myself, relax, learn something - I worked a lot on my blog, but I’ve got two kids at home going through their life changes. I’m with them for most of the day, defusing fights, keeping them on course with school and homework, and generally being there for them - with the background sound of video games that I can’t play.

I also helped out a bit with my own company, but it’s the sort of tasks that need doing but that we’re reluctant to move people away from what they’re doing, so I do them, but it’s not a motivation booster - let’s say.

The uncertainty is playing an increasingly dominant role, I’ve been through the 2008 crisis with my hands on the wheel so I can read some signs and I know how bad things operate quickly.

I’m hopeful and I’m taking all the chances I can see, but it’s cloudy and it takes its toll.

I’m lucky enough to have access to a group of great people. Leaders in the industry, super-smart folk, they can make bread, repair a car, devise a custom PCB to control their fish tank and hook it up to a cloud infrastructure with machine learning to ensure maximum Fish Happiness Yield without breaking a sweat.

It’s great, but it’s overwhelming because the group melts into one entity - them - and every day I look around and I have to confront me being barely able to keep myself from drolling and stand up correctly versus this other entity that overachieves at everything.

Usually, that’s where individual friendship comes along, you talk person to person and this feeling dissipates into something more logical, human, and relatable - who can relate to Superman right? - but I’ve made a very good wall over the years and my 1:1s are always around work or what I can do for people - so when work is off and nobody needs my help, that’s it. This also seems to deprive me of honest feedback, nobody tells me when I’m being a dick and silence is not good feedback, so I’m not a better person and that’s a waste.

Now it’s not like the pandemic did much to make things worse - I wasn’t physically visiting people anyway - but it did bring it to light. In a time of overwhelming connectivity, I’ve become aware of how lonely I am, poetic as it should.

I guess the third prong in this Pandemic Rake that I continuously fail to locate and keep stepping on - with the comedic effect of getting hit in the face - is that we get to watch humanity play this out.

As we stand, we don’t have a vaccine and we don’t have a cure, we’re learning about all the side effects of this particular virus and studies and enough statistical information has to compete with a real-life emergency - an ongoing one.

Worldwide governments have had to deal with an emergent problem with limited information and with uncertainty the spectrum of options goes from “Ultra Careful” to “I don’t think this is even a problem” and we’re seeing this play out across the globe.

The other thing is that clearly a lot of people have never had to deal with complex problems, they demand that all answers are prompt and unequivocal and should never be taken back - they demand 100% certainty when certainty is the only thing we certainly don’t have. It’s also a characteristic of these folks that they are perpetually right and they’re prepared to shout at you until they get what they want but aren’t prepared to listen to you. This sort of thing is tiresome on the day to day projects you do for work, but it’s downright depressing when applied to a global problem.

I’m certain that human society will always evolve - unless we press the red button on the doomsday device that is - but it’s not because anyone knows what they’re doing, it’s because statistically the right solution always emerges - i.e. the one that didn’t kill everyone and that made something cheaper / better / easier.

Anyway, as the saying goes

Life sucks and then you stop being able to process nutrients and become nutrient yourself with no long-lasting effects from your passage on this instance of the simulation!

40/365 - Tech Talks London

david@ragingnexus.com (David Ramalho) — Thu, 07 May 2020 00:00:00 +0100

TL;DR;

This funny thing happened, on Tuesday Vitor sent me a brief message inviting me to be on the Tech Talks London (@techtalkslondon) show, which I accepted.

The format is simple enough, it’s a casual conversation on topics that touch science, technology, communication, business, etc. Vitor pulled up a list of recent news and we talked for a bit about them, easy peasy, the show is linked bellow, it’s in Portuguese, I hope you enjoy it.

The long version

Well, since we’re here, I might as well talk a little bit about how the overall experience went on a personal level and run over the notes I took for the show.

Hi, I’m David Ramalho and I play a Regular Human Person on TV

This might come as a surprise, but I’m what I think can be described as an Functional Introvert - which means that while I rather not, I can do a passable impression of a person capable of muttering words in front of other people - so of course, when Vitor invited me, I proceeded to delay any decisions for as long as it was respectfully possible. Once I’ve made peace with myself and successfully ran the “What’s the Worse that Can Happen” I ended up accepting the invitation, but it’s funny how everything works from that point on, it’s like a weight I carry around, I prepared as much as I could, took notes, read the news, I then spent quite a bit arranging the stu…kitchen , I got lights from the bedroom and arranged the background … and then we started talking.

Now, in retrospect as I watched the video a few things are very clear - and I guess these are extremely common and easily(ish) trainable:

I mumble but I don’t say nearly as much as I wanted to say - I clearly can’t prioritize words and message correctly
The rate at which I say the word “whatever” is still very high, I’ll need to come up with a different one next time
I could do with better microphone positioning, which normally is fine, but I was rocking back in forth (mostly back, AWAY FROM THE CAMERA) in the chair and it was scratching the tshirt the whole time, awful
I tend towards silliness , I knew this, in general I prefer humor over dryness, but I understand how that comes off if you’re seeing me for the first time
My Lockdown haircut works!!! :P

Thank you for inviting me - I took it as a challenge.

Notes

So in preparation for the show I took a few notes, since they’re lying there, I might as well share them.

Airbnb to lay off 25% of it’s work force

This particular topic is very close to me, as it’s public knowledge I’m CTO for Homestay.com and although vast dimensions apart, we’re on the same space as Airbnb and of course we know exactly what the industry is going through, because we’re going through the exact same, except with less access to resources.

The signs were there, Airbnb raised / borrowed $2 billion in capital, considering they had $1.1 billion in revenue (at a loss of $276.4 M - which means very roughly speaking they spent $1.3 Billion) in Q4 2019 - so that money was only going to take them maybe 4 months at that spend rate. On top of that, the way the market is and how they operate, two things are happening at any given rate:

A percentage of the money they made in 2020 (and 2019 as well) came from Booking Fees for bookings in the future, some of those bookings never happened because of lockdowns and people initiated refunds - directly with Airbnb or payment providers. So that drained a percentage of that revenue
As the news intensified and lockdowns were enacted across the globe booking certainly dropped , which means the previously lost revenue is not being replaced with new one

This is very likely the picture for most of the industry and you can understand how much of a strain this puts on companies, so cost cutting measures are guaranteed and salaries are usually a very big chunk of the operating costs. To add to this, the future in this space completely uncertain, it really depends on whether or not a proper cure / vaccine comes along and how the world looks like when it does, so nobody, NOBODY, knows what’s going to happen, they can model and they can wishful think, but it’s a big unknown and companies need to prepare for that special “worst case scenario that’s not so bad that it means there’s a slight chance we can survive” - no matter how confident experts and CEO’s seem, absolutely no one knows how this is going to play out.

In the open message from Brian to the company / world he said as much

We don’t know exactly when travel will return

When travel does return, it will look different

While we know Airbnb’s business will fully recover, the changes it will undergo are not temporary or short-lived. Because of this, we need to make more fundamental changes to Airbnb by reducing the size of our workforce around a more focused business strategy.

Out of our 7,500 Airbnb employees, nearly 1,900 teammates will have to leave Airbnb, comprising around 25% of our company. Since we cannot afford to do everything that we used to, these cuts had to be mapped to a more focused business.

This means that we will need to reduce our investment in activities that do not directly support the core of our host community. We are pausing our efforts in Transportation and Airbnb Studios, and we have to scale back our investments in Hotels and Lux.

And then what I think is a hint at where the majority of the layoffs are going to happen

While our process may differ by country, we have tried to be thoughtful in planning for every employee. In the US and Canada, I can provide immediate clarity. Within the next few hours, those of you leaving Airbnb will receive a calendar invite to a departure meeting with a senior leader in your department. It was important to us that wherever we legally could, people were informed in a personal, 1:1 conversation. The final working day for departing employees based in the US and Canada will be Monday, May 11. We felt Monday would give people time to begin taking next steps and say goodbye — we understand and respect how important this is.

Brian also explain what specific business units are affected, some I didn’t even know about:

AirBnb Transportation - which sounds like they were aiming for an ‘Uber for Airbnb Guests’ (Uber, which is laying off 3700 people)
Airbnb Studios - I couldn’t find anything specific on this - it’s a hard SEO proposition - but I think it’s a production studio, potentially for stuff like this
Airbnb Lux - probably unsurprising
Airbnb Hotels - This is probably a hard space for them, between regulation and incumbents I’m sure they struggled with not being able to completely bulldoze this market space, not entirely sure the pandemic isn’t just a good excuse

FlexDev Predicts a Shift in Offshoring to Nearshoring Due to COVID-19

It’s a story in three acts really, starts with a bold claim that offers no reasoning

Polish-based award-winning outsourcing firm FlexDev predicts a shift in outsourcing IT and Finance functions, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, forcing business leaders to rethink their outsourcing destinations. The change could see jobs being brought back in-house locally or see companies leveraging a nearshore delivery function to gain more control and reduce risk. During this downtime for businesses, created by the world COVID-19 pandemic, business execs are starting to re-evaluate and are rethinking their outsourcing strategy including models, and destinations, according to FlexDev’s Executive Vice President, Graham Fell.

Then someone points this out

Elias van Herwaarden, Founder of “Locationperspectives” and visiting professor at the Faculty of Business and Economics, commented: “Nearshoring will gain a bit of momentum, indeed. But given the wage cost differences with far-shoring and the nature of the work sent to e.g. India or the Philippines, I do not expect a one-on-one transfer-back. Nearshore wage costs and employee aspirations simply are prohibitive to re-shoring the very transactional work that was sent to low cost countries across the globe AI and RPA as the more likely response. GBS and SSCs will very likely bring the processes back home - on-shore and nearshore. They will increasingly opt for distributed, networked service delivery models. Locations with mature shared services/delivery ecosystems could benefit from this. At least if they can adequately respond to an accelerated need for digitally educated and STEM talent.”

And then they drop all pretention and follow through with the Advert

“Culturally there is very little difference between Poland, the US and other European countries. This contrasts with the top outsourcing software destinations – China and India. Poland also boasts excellent language skills ranking ninth in the world in the EF English Proficiency index 2015 and 10th in the 2016 edition, getting ahead of most Eastern European countries. Poland offers a stable and healthy economy, a highly skilled workforce, a dynamically growing IT market and US and EU standards in IP protection and data security,” confirmed Mr Fell.

(shrug)

Health Passports / Contact Tracing

Coronavirus UK: Health passports possible in months

I love the opening bit, it adjusts the lenses you should wear when reading these news

Tech firms are in talks with ministers about creating health passports to help Britons return safely to work using coronavirus testing and facial recognition. Facial biometrics could be used to help provide a digital certificate – sometimes known as an immunity passport – proving which workers have had Covid-19, as a possible way of easing the impact on the economy and businesses from ongoing physical distancing even after current lockdown measures are eased.

I particularly like this bit

The government is understood to be moving away from the phrase “immunity passport” as evidence continues to emerge on exactly how immunity develops after someone has had Covid-19. The World Health Organization has also issued a stark warning over attempts to give people false assurance through a passport scheme.

My thoughts on this are:

Science needs to unequivocally say that you are indeed protected from further infection for this to mean anything, until they do, having a “I Got Covid and all I got was my face in a biometric database” just means you’re probably capable of transmitting the disease and maybe you’re immune to it.
The economy is a mess, you’ll see a lot of companies that are struggling with business or that had products that they’ve struggled to market before attempt to find new business opportunities , so some pressure will come from entrepreneurism to adopt (anything they sell) as a (solution to something related to COVID-19)

Contact-tracing apps are not a solution to the COVID-19 crisis

A few highlights, but please, read the whole article

We are concerned by this rising enthusiasm for automated technology as a centerpiece of infection control. Between us, we hold extensive expertise in technology, law and policy, and epidemiology. We have serious doubts that voluntary, anonymous contact tracing through smartphone apps—as Apple, Google, and faculty at a number of academic institutions all propose—can free Americans of the terrible choice between staying home or risking exposure. We worry that contact-tracing apps will serve as vehicles for abuse and disinformation, while providing a false sense of security to justify reopening local and national economies well before it is safe to do so. Our recommendations are aimed at reducing the harm of a technological intervention that seems increasingly inevitable.

Contact tracing can be an important component of an epidemic response especially when the prevalence of infection is low. Such efforts are most effective where testing is rapid and widely available and when infections are relatively rare—conditions that are currently unusual in the United States. Ideally, manual contact tracing by trained professionals can help identify candidates for testing and quarantine to help contain the spread of coronavirus.

The lure of automating the painstaking process of contact tracing is apparent. But to date, no one has demonstrated that it’s possible to do so reliably despite numerous concurrent attempts. Apps that notify participants of disclosure could, on the margins and in the right conditions, help direct testing resources to those at higher risk. Anything else strikes us as implausible at best, and dangerous at worst.

The Apple-Google API supports the specific functionality of warning participants if their phone has been near the phone of a person who reported being COVID-19 positive. To be clear, the companies are not planning to develop an app themselves, which would require addressing some of the more challenging issues around how to verify that a user has been infected and what policies to suggest when individuals are alerted to being “in contact” with an infected individual. Ultimately, they have left it up to public health officials, or whoever else develops the apps, to determine their functionality and uses—subject, of course, to the constraints of the platform.

And finally, the issue of malicious use is paramount—particularly given this current climate of disinformation, astroturfing, and political manipulation. Imagine an unscrupulous political operative who wanted to dampen voting participation in a given district, or a desperate business owner who wanted to stifle competition. Either could falsely report incidences of coronavirus without much fear of repercussion. Trolls could sow chaos for the malicious pleasure of it. Protesters could trigger panic as a form of civil disobedience. A foreign intelligence operation could shut down an entire city by falsely reporting COVID-19 infections in every neighborhood. There are a great many vulnerabilities underlying this platform that have still yet to be explored.

No special comment needed

Netflix and ICA launch a contest to support the writing of series and documentaries in Portugal

I guess because I’ve had some proximity to the entertainment industry this isn’t exactly surprising. Netflix - as all the new streaming giants that need original content to show some value in a world where Disney decided to enter that market - is hungry for original content and on the back of hits like Dark and [La Casa De Papel][https://www.netflix.com/title/80192098] they are probably looking at all countries with content production capabilities.

The contest itself is relatively low budgeted - at least for someone with Netflix’s pockets - with a total of €155k in prize money for the top 10 entries. Netflix will then decide which ones are potentially good matches and they’ll engage in private negotiation with any ones - if any - they deem fit. This just came out of the Marketing Department Budget really.

As for Netflix, getting in content irrespective of the location has been an intentional strategy for Netflix so this is part of that

“Talent has no boundaries,” explained Avalos, who will move to Spain in coming weeks. “IP has no boundaries, and the way IP gets adapted and talent can travel throughout our territories is something we constantly speak to each other about.”

One producer asked Finke why Netflix was a better choice as a funding partner than a string of international distributors combined. “When I began in the industry 15 years ago we took projects to MIP for international sales,” he commented. “If we sold four or five territories that felt like a win at the time. If you bring a show to us today we can find a global audience in one go. That’s a very exciting thing for filmmakers.”

It’s good though, the next few years might bring new players to the financing side of content creation in Portugal - in this case - I hope everyone takes advantage of this opportunity. Can’t wait for the first Portuguese show to debut in Netflix.

40/363 - Blog Updates

david@ragingnexus.com (David Ramalho) — Tue, 05 May 2020 00:00:00 +0100

I’ve been using the blog as a way to keep busy, keep active and get my mind off a good number of things, so a bunch of things have changed recently and I’ll take this opportunity to make an inventory, for the sake of my memory. So, ordered in Reverse Boredom Order, the changes have been

Build system

Part of my “Save David’s SSD” movement included removing as much file processing away from my computer as possible, so I finally took the time to setup a remote box and a CI process to test, build, deploy (staging / production) - the usual - the blog. Best (however long that took me in hours) I ever spent.

Underlying platform

TLDR:

Upgraded Jekyll to 4.0
Upgraded Sprockets to 4.0 (and jekyll-assets to the unreleased 4.0 version)

The blog’s current form uses Jekyll and the 4.0 version has been out for a while but I haven’t been able to upgrade until now. Reason is I’ve been using Sprockets to manage my assets - via the lovely jekyll-assets gem and moving everything to Sprockets 4.0 took a little bit of messing around to get to work. In the process I made a bit of a gem upgrade / spring cleaning, which is nice too.

Images images images

Since I have a complete Asset pipeline at my disposal it seemed wrong not to abuse the privilege, so I’ve replaced all / most image tags with srcset options, which basically offers the browser with image density/resolution options so that it can download the most appropriate one for the user at the time. I’ve been putting off having some dynamic image processor in front of this - I’m taking the static blog thing for it’s word - so that means that I’m now generating a few versions of each image (in the original format and webp - 5 versions plus the original, which the pipeline also compresses and massages).

I’ve also added loading='lazy' to every image tag, which sadly is not wide spread yet so I also added a billion javascript lines to cover for the browsers that don’t implement lazy loading natively via lazysizes.

And finally, having more pictures in the pipeline means rmagick’s legendary performance issues finally came into full view so I had to do some work to get rid of it completely. For one all the assets are now processed with libvips - massive massive difference compared to imagemagick - and then, because I’m generating a bit more colormaps for the game galleries (that’s coming next), I had to replace all the rmagick code with a mogrified version via minimagick - I’ll have to update the blog post to reflect those changes.

<figure id="post-header-david-s-photo-november" class="ink-image post-excerpt">
  <picture class="lazy-bones " style="padding-bottom: 50.0%">
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      data-srcset="/assets/2eabc6-c9efa3c37cdc0d7f820971fc4c27c9bc1540d57b4ec7bce5f8ea0758e0a4f5e4219063f75af5225f699f626cd9ae04c9c73a8a373c0031faf35326e8b72828fc.webp 2048w" 
      type="image/webp" 
      media="(min-width:1025px)" 
      data-aspectratio="1600/800" 
      srcset="/assets/2eabc6-c9efa3c37cdc0d7f820971fc4c27c9bc1540d57b4ec7bce5f8ea0758e0a4f5e4219063f75af5225f699f626cd9ae04c9c73a8a373c0031faf35326e8b72828fc.webp 2048w" 
    >

    <source 
      data-srcset="/assets/199964-49bf533a49f0d82c22cff65990a82d1fcaac2724ed9c799589b7ddb5e168eb56564b3bd71b3742a630b6f1ba3dd50c56e082a738a3e16048ef5e6493e344260c.webp 1024w" 
      type="image/webp" 
      media="(max-width:1024px)" 
      data-aspectratio="1600/800" 
      srcset="/assets/199964-49bf533a49f0d82c22cff65990a82d1fcaac2724ed9c799589b7ddb5e168eb56564b3bd71b3742a630b6f1ba3dd50c56e082a738a3e16048ef5e6493e344260c.webp 1024w"
    >

    <source 
      data-srcset="/assets/34a41e-2d03e23baa850c0d17d6572b043155d4fe246da329445acfb96c6d998917276eb5a5b92a1b53ef6b58eb32f21c2c25efde57108eaf50ab306db10704d58efec7.webp 640w" 
      type="image/webp" 
      media="(max-width:640px)" 
      data-aspectratio="1600/800" 
      srcset="/assets/34a41e-2d03e23baa850c0d17d6572b043155d4fe246da329445acfb96c6d998917276eb5a5b92a1b53ef6b58eb32f21c2c25efde57108eaf50ab306db10704d58efec7.webp 640w"
    >

    <source 
      data-srcset="/assets/e3bdbd-0f30307e4cc620e9299d69ddc2ccf0502d2d77ae2d787a33bdb23b1740bf3efd3f5becd586df19598d5566e94761ac5cc0faeb7e60d80601ad5f1a10be0f6d7e.jpg 1024w" 
      media="(max-width:1024px)" 
      data-aspectratio="1600/800" 
      srcset="/assets/e3bdbd-0f30307e4cc620e9299d69ddc2ccf0502d2d77ae2d787a33bdb23b1740bf3efd3f5becd586df19598d5566e94761ac5cc0faeb7e60d80601ad5f1a10be0f6d7e.jpg 1024w"
    >

    <source 
      data-srcset="/assets/2679a1-b01048addfac7d1f255ce54adbe78afe325ae22ac00c75da6b3dea5b99bda4008cd629b9832c9c3eb42dbc74d80fe01343cc0cf667e4b8b2b897e607947c1216.jpg 640w" 
      media="(max-width:640px)" 
      data-aspectratio="1600/800" 
      srcset="/assets/2679a1-b01048addfac7d1f255ce54adbe78afe325ae22ac00c75da6b3dea5b99bda4008cd629b9832c9c3eb42dbc74d80fe01343cc0cf667e4b8b2b897e607947c1216.jpg 640w"
    >
    
    <img 
      data-src="/assets/post-headers/extra-large/37-210-davids-photo-november-d6fd90594a962132dbc04e1530e36447b8a033899c0832b7846f3d6cf1cd1e5cfba8d21ac5a11fe1ffeb028809dd48e7b8a383d0bc3d84a9a6bf93778852e22c.jpg" 
      loading="lazy" 
      alt="" 
      class=" lazyloaded" 
      width="1600" 
      height="800" 
      data-aspectratio="" 
      src="/assets/post-headers/extra-large/37-210-davids-photo-november-d6fd90594a962132dbc04e1530e36447b8a033899c0832b7846f3d6cf1cd1e5cfba8d21ac5a11fe1ffeb028809dd48e7b8a383d0bc3d84a9a6bf93778852e22c.jpg">
  </picture>
  <figcaption id="post-header-caption" class="over-top">
    <h1 class="post-title">David's Photo November</h1>
    <p class="post-meta">Dec 4, 2016</p>
  </figcaption>
</figure>

Post readability

When I published this post, a couple of Internet Friends - @isacosta and @lconfraria - pointed out just how horrible it was to read the posts and - thankfully for this caveman - pointed me in the right direction, so I went and tried to make it better.

Since I was there and because I’ve been doing this at night, it became very clear that I needed a dark mode, so I went and added that too.

New section - Arcade

This was a nice one I think, I like to play my games and while I don’t play often - days, WHOLE DAYS go by between me sitting down for 30m to play whatever - but the games I do play and that I enjoyed almost all have Photo Mode and up until now the most I’ve done was a couple of twitter threads, but that has zero lasting value so I thought I would open a section to put those in and give them a better resting place and that’s why I added the Arcade.

It’s a simple enough page, it’s a couple of lines of text and a bunch of pictures, but I wanted to do something nice(r) and since I already had the code to generate colormaps, I now generate colormaps for each picture, which I show in the form of a slideshow and generate a background for each picture based on it’s color pallette . I’m really happy with the way it came out and I think I’ve given the screenshots a nice home now.

Tweaks tweaks tweaks

I’ve been trying to tidy up things a bit, I’ve fixed a few bugs or just plain weird CSS I had. I’ve added a sidebar menu for smaller screens - it became very obvious I needed one when I added the new section - on top of all the image changes I talked about before.

It’s not perfect - and it’s hard for me to see what and where I should improve things , so if something offends you, please let me know, trust me, I need your help, it’s not on purpose :) . One thing I know I’ll need to have a proper bare knuckle fight with is - funny enough - the new slideshow / responsive image / lazy loading combo that I decided to put in which, in short, causes a very ugly and shameful reflow flicker each time a new image is loading.

On that, a couple of notes:

Firefox does it right - they recommend that you add width and height to your image - doesn’t matter if it’s the final display dimensions, as long as it reflects the image ratio that’s being loaded, Firefox will draw a nice placeholder based on that information and zero reflow occurs.
Chrome was supposed to do it right, but what worked in Firefox didn’t work in Chrome - the reflow was very obvious and until I added the JS library to lazy load even in browsers that don’t natively support things, it was my biggest nightmare.
WHEN I ADDED THE JS LIBRARY THOUGH ALL BROWSERS STARTED DISPLAYING THE REFLOW ISSUE , so now it’s a nightmare no matter where you look at it. I’ll need to fix this soon.

Anyway, I think that more or less sums it up, it’s been entertaining, this blog has been with me for almost 16 years - more as a way to keep busy than an actual writing repository - and it’s nice to see it move forward and it’s nice to take some stock now and then.

Please please please, take me seriously, if you’re visually inclined and you spot something that’s just wrong and can be improved, reach out, I’ll be super grateful.

40/352 - Urban Farming

david@ragingnexus.com (David Ramalho) — Wed, 22 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0100

I’ve never had a green thumb but plants seem to be - mostly - David proof and I do enjoy the process of taking a tiny seed and watching as the machine work its way into a full grown plant - sometimes with delicious results.

It’s ironic that it’s only when I live in apartments that I feel the urge to plant stuff, for 8 years I had a back yard in Dublin - now there’s a lot of back and forth - and all I have to show is a failed Pinapple Experiment - yes nothing screams TROPICAL quite like Ireland.

Just the same, some of my previous hits include:

Throwing tomato leftovers into a vase - the fruit of which we actually ate
Throwing a Mango pit into a larger vase. That was cool actually, the thing grew to a 60cm mini tree, thick trunk, large leafs, it was great, I was very proud of that one.
Throwing watermelon seeds at yet another vase. The poor thing tried, I had a 1.5m plant across my balcony and tiny little watermelons tried their luck, but it’s hard when the soil beneath you is made of ceramic tiles.

Now, with the current situation a lot of plans have halted and the future - which after basically the whole of last year and how bad it turned out to be - is muddier than ever, so while everyone’s making bread at home, I decided to give it another shot at making , errr , a Caesar Salad at home?

What’s more, I decided that while I would still apply the old David way of “this looks like something that might grow, I’ll throw it into some soil”, this time around, I would have records of it and I might actually learn something in the process. And that’s what I want to share here.

To have records, I would need to track stuff - I’m going to buy soil and vases if and when I can, and because I’m likely to use leftover stuff for seeds, things are going to come in whenever they come in, so I came up with a system to do it that even I can stick to.

Spreadsheets and Plant IDs

So my thinking is, I really don’t know much about how certain plants grow, when’s the best time to seed them, etc. I could read about it and watch Youtube videos, sure, but - and this is true - I have time and for a lot of things I prefer building an experimental knowledge base first - whenever possible or feasable - and then turning to proper resources with a clearer idea of what I need to find out. That’s the approach I’m taking here, I’ll do all sorts of newbie mistakes, so if you’re out there, don’t refrain from letting someone is wrong on the Internet - in this case, me.

Ok, so what I need to know:

When did I plant something
Where did it come from
How did it progress over time
When did I buy that soil
Do I need to do something about it
How much have I spent so far
Did I ever try X and Y before?
Am I sure you can’t plant bread? How do I know? What about sausages, the vegan kind of course?

Identifying and tracking a plant

So, first thing’s first, I need to know how to address each plant, from putting it in a vase until I inevitably do something wrong and kill it. I wouldn’t be able to label plants - it might be done, I’m just saying I can’t without posing a threat to them - so I decided to stick to things that are likely to live for a very long time, in this case my vases.

Vase 1 - it'll sort of hang from the side of leftover pallet - reserved for Stawberries

Vase 2 - the plan is to buy as many of these as it takes to fill out the top of the second pallet

So now that I can identify each vase, I just need to know what’s in it, so I took a permanent marker (🤷‍♂️) and not very carefully divided it into a grid

Vase 2 - can address at most 8 plants

Vase 3 - can address as most 32, but it'll never happen

Grand so, now as long as I respect the grid I can address any plant, and as long as I batch things - so that if a plant is replaced with a new one, I get a new number - I’m fine.

Looking good #121A, keep up the good work

You can also see what happens when I want to use more space in the grid, my wife got me some Romanesco broccoli seeds which I decided to throw immediatly into the soil, but from the pictures it looked big, so I thought maybe it needed more space than the garlics, so I reserved all four grid cells for the thing. We’ll see what #1212CD turns into :)

Now, there’s the case of plants that are still in the nursery, for those ones I decided not to do anything special, once they go into their final spot, they’re good and ready and I can track them - I don’t track plants from birth, I KNOW RIGHT?

Keeping a log

Ok, the other thing I thought might make sense is keeping a log of how things progress. So given I have a plant ID, and since Google Docs now lets me insert pictures into cells, I can keep a log of things, with pictures.

Other stuff

Since I’m at it and since it’s easy to write stuff down when you buy them, I’m also keeping track of how much I’ve spent. And since I’m at it I figured I better track when the soil went in, I guess I’ll eventually have to do something about it.

That’s it for now, I couldn’t think of anything else to log, but let’s be honest, none of this carries much weight, but it’s also low maintenance which is good, time will tell if this is useful or not, and most importantly, time will tell if I can get a meal out of this or not :) .

That’s it, David signing off, quarantine Day #41 — 🤔 maybe I should have lead with that

To blog again

david@ragingnexus.com (David Ramalho) — Fri, 17 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0100

So it turns out I can blink and see one year and a half go by, who knew. To say that things have been less than ideal and that plans made were plans ditched is sort of an understatement - I mean, end of January I was quietly celebrating having finally beaten a 4 month long, recurring infection with weird exams and my first ever surgery and now we’re in the middle of a once in a century GLOBAL PANDEMIC.

“It hasn’t been ideal!” — said David

Anyway, for the longest time I’ve been feeling disconnected with the world, trapped in my own head. I never had many friends and I made mild attempts at getting physically closer to the ones I have but between my illness and now a national lockdown, it hasn’t worked out exactly as planned. I still talk to them via the customary Chat application du jour and it’s great, I mean, it’s really great and they’re great people, but the more I disconnect the harder it is to deal with people in general. And it gets slightly worse if you take a group of individually brilliant people, together they form a mass of overachieveness that you simply can’t compete with , at any level.

“Finally, my powers of introversion prove useful” — said No One Ever Esquire

The other link I have to humanity is Twitter and that’s been a different kind of beast. It’s a literal amalgamation of people and machines, of the meek and the powerful and it’s society in compact form. It takes a lot of work to curate who to follow and what to be drawn into and not, who to pay particular attention to for the good reasons and also for all the bad ones. It’s also a space where you can say what you want and be surprised at who’s listening and who talks back, but it’s also unpredictable and work intensive, connections are flimsy, context is slim and shortness is king.

“in a room with 1 billion voices, nobody can hear you scream so your best bet it so scream along with them”

In all this I’ve been closing myself in, I go quiet and most of the talking goes in my head, which works great but more and more I feel I need to let some of it come out, not for the sake of other people but for my sake. It’s Rubber Duck Debugging but applied to real life, it’s a mental health tool, one of many, one I want to explore a bit more.

Which lead me here, to my blog, where words come to die, or to be cast in stone, whichever metaphor suits me at the time. I’ve decided to reinvest in it and now especially I decided that I need to simplify my own access to it, so I’ve been quietly reworking some of the infrastructure and tools to remove any difficulty and adjacent excuses, this post is a trial run of that work.

It’s also a test to myself, to be able to say and publish whatever goes in my mind, not worrying about how that looks and what people might think, which is a particular issue I have. I don’t mind ridicule and in practice I’ve handled embarrassing situations very well all my life, but while it’s easy for me to handle things when they happen, I COMPLETELY DREAD THE POSSIBILITY THAT SOMETHING I’M DOING MIGHT CAUSE SUCH A THING TO HAPPEN.

People are just weird, sadly I too am People

So we’ll see, I want to get into some sort of rhythm, the more you do, the easier it is, the more you do - I’ll practice that for a bit and see how it feels. This one’s for me, just for me.

Stay safe, stay well, much love David

On Flickr and our future together!

david@ragingnexus.com (David Ramalho) — Sun, 18 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been using Flickr since September 2004. My usage changed throughout the years, especially as new platforms came about. At the beginning and as I worked through learning photography Flickr was my uncomfortable zone where I would upload pictures and sit quietly waiting for something, anything. As the years went by and I learned enough to not suck and to not wait in vain I started engaging with Groups and other people and what I put in I would roughly get back and that was good.

By now other platforms came along, namely Instagram and they made things easy, easier than Flickr ever made them. They gave you filters and a fixed squared format and you could only use this from your phone and suddenly everyone could be a photographer. This was cool and they stuck their foot in the door - or rather, they ripped apart a wall, made a door there and stuck their foot in it.

With time came basic stats, hashtags, one more format, a bunch of filters and editing settings and the ability to upload your pictures - which meant your camera pictures were able to make into Instagram, and why wouldn’t you - , but most of all came a rush of people into the platform and the game for Followers and Likes took over.

Instagram is, right now, to photography what Youtube is for video, it’s the platform for monetizing yourself, to get to sponsors, to be an Influencer or to be hired. I don’t think there’s any denying that and, well, that’s what Instagram fought for and that’s fine.

In the meantime - while Instagram was morphing and growing and I was actively using it - I started a personal project which required me to be a consumer of other people’s work so that I could discover and curate my new gallery.

For a while I tried to use Instagram, it wasn’t easy to get links of pictures and links to the original work into Tumblr but it was manageable, the biggest problem then was finding the quality stuff. Back then both Instagram and Flickr were feeding Things David Likes but even then - and I have no stats, only gut feeling - for every 1 Instagram post I would find 10 on Flickr. As a measure of quality, this has meaning.

As time went by something else happened, Instagram began to lock down its API and external integrations. So now it wasn’t just an issue of finding good work, it was an issue of linking to it - well, not technically linking, but having the bare minimum tools to do it in a timely fashion.

I also considered other platforms, some with a good noise-to-quality ratio like EyeEm and 500px but the initial lack of integration with other tools and subsequent closing down of API’s meant I would focus solely on Flickr.

Now, I joined Flickr on the year they came out and since they’ve been bought by Yahoo, followed by a few years of investment and then disinvestment on the platform, followed by Verizon buying Yahoo and further exposing Flickr’s staleness up until very recently when SmugMug stepped up and bought Flickr with the promise of actually using Flickr as it was meant to be.

While they changed in ownership, in technical terms they kinda stopped evolving a few years into Yahoo ownership. The attempts to win back that market were very much Enterprisey-meets-Startup-Baloney - namely the 1TB Free Storage for no good reason and the half backed redesign. Those choices never made the impact they wanted and in fact, some of those choices have to be taken back now to make way for a more sustainable business approach.

But why is it that with so many competitors and disinvestment Flickr still endures and, actually picked someone’s interest enough to put money into it?

I can’t give you a global answer, but here’s what keeps me using it:

The personal feed is decent and manageable, I don’t want to say it’s because it’s chronological, but yes, it’s because it’s chronological (something that’s now so rare it’s becoming Hipster again)
Flickr Groups - despite a lot of them being Social Growth Hacks - are great. If you find the right ones, you get access to a lot of quality work, ensured by correct curation and administration. Again, hashtags are all the rage, but curation gives you quality
The API was and given every competitor is in Lock-the-doors-mode, the most comprehensive and open around.

This last point is interesting for me in that, despite being nerdy-factor, it gives you some insight into how the business is operating. If you close down the API to protect Assets or cut other software clients out, you’re telling us something and we should listen.

As examples, look at the wording here:

The history of 500px has always encouraged creative development, but as of January 24th 2018, 500px will no longer be offering free access to our API. This decision was made in order to protect our assets and improve our website’s performance. On June 15th, access to the API was shut down. This is part of a larger strategic shift—focusing our energy on continuing to build the world’s best photography community at 500px.com.

From: 500px - API

and here

To continuously improve Instagram users’ privacy and security, we are accelerating the deprecation of Instagram API Platform, making the following changes effective immediately. We understand that this may affect your business or services, and we appreciate your support in keeping our platform secure.

These capabilities will be disabled immediately (previously set for July 31, 2018 or December 11, 2018 deprecation). The following will be deprecated according to the timeline we shared previously:

Public Content - all remaining capabilities to read public media on a user’s behalf on December 11, 2018

Basic - to read a user’s own profile info and media in early 2020

From: Instagram Developer page

Now, this is where we are now and what SmugMug will do is yet to be seen. They’ve run their business in what I think is a sustainable way and the announced changes to Flickr also point in that direction, so if you’re upfront about how you make money, that’s good for everyone.

There’s a lot of hope in the new management and this interview and this Reddit AMA empowers that hope, namely this

The company is trying to move away from the Yahoo-era model, which subsidized the generous storage capacity by selling advertising. The new Flickr approach takes a more SmugMug-like approach: pay for the service, and the company will work hard to make sure you think it’s worth paying for, without sharing your personal data with advertisers. The goal is to focus Flickr on a community of photographers, not on people who want a free place to back up their images.

Again, if you’re upfront about how you plan to make your money, everyone benefits and trust is gained.

What I hope first and foremost is that the current community over at Flickr doesn’t take too much of a loss over the following months and quality people don’t run off. I also hope that photographers - which are the target here - consider Flickr as a platform for them again and some make a comeback (I follow way too many people who have gone silent over the years) and new ones come in.

As for me, I’ll continue to focus on TDL as a project to find and expose quality and talent. Flickr helps me find those nuggets on a daily basis, the API helps me feed the website and social networks and the newly created group gives me a platform to engage directly with the creators.

Now, having said all these things, the last thing I want to say is that I’m buying into the business model they announced and so I’ve just purchased the Pro account despite my own photography activity having slowed down tremendously lately.

I hope they improve the site, I hope they improve things like the Explore tab which is absolutely not a place where you find quality work and it feels like it should be and I hope they don’t cut down on what makes Flickr different. And I hope they give the mobile apps (namely the iPad one) lots and lots of love, but most of all, I hope they settle down and work away.

Big hopes, big expectations, I will see you there :)

Blog Upgrades - Header Image color scheme

david@ragingnexus.com (David Ramalho) — Sun, 13 May 2018 00:00:00 +0100

For the longest time I’ve been meaning to do a design overhaul on this blog but my life outside the workplace is either filled with more work or my zombifying completely in a universe of idiotic multitasking what passes for entertainment and not actually achieving anything - this is an actual issue I’ve been going through for a while now and I can acknowledge it in certain moments of clarity but I haven’t been able to fix it - #LifeHowDoesItWork. This means that the whole “REDESIGN ALL THE THINGS” pipe dream as surprisingly remained a dream but I can do the next best thing - VERY TINY INCREMENTAL IMPROVEMENTS AND/OR STUFF THAT I THROW AT THIS BLOG.

So, a big part of the original design of this space was to give images a prime spot and none gets more emphasis than the post header so I wanted to do something around that. Namely, given I try to use photographs for the headers and they, usually, carry a lot of color, I wanted to modify the look of the post page based on the colors present in the picture, so each post would have it’s own visual identity based on the header image I used.

Fine, we get it, let’s get to the details

Alright alright, so, details then. This blog is built using Jekyll, so it uses Ruby and that’s what I’m going to work with. My first goal was to have something look at an image and give me a given number of colors that show the most in that image. While I could obviously work on designing and building my own wheel - which would be great and amazing thank you very much - I decided to take a look at imagemagick and use the Ruby binding provided by rmagic - because let’s face it, I would build a square wheel anyway.

Now of course, imagemagick is capable of generating a color_histogram and that pretty much solves the issue for me, but because what I really really want is a feel for the most important colors in the image and not every single individual color in it, I use another great little method called quantize which does exactly what I want.

So with that, I iterate over all the posts that have header images and I do something like

def colormap(img_path)
  Magick::Image.read(img_path)
    .first
    .quantize(NUMBER_OF_COLORS, Magick::SRGBColorspace, Magick::RiemersmaDitherMethod)
    .color_histogram
    .keys
    .sort_by(&:intensity)
    .map do |color|
      # 8-bit rgb representation
      color.to_color(Magick::AllCompliance, false, 8)
    end
end

Roughly what’s happening here is:

I’m reading the image using the read command
I tell imagemagick to reduce the number of colors in the image to a given number - I picked 5 because much arbitrary opinion
With that reduced image I grab the color histogram - this gives the list of colors in the image
For the sake of predictably I sort the colors by the intensity value - darker to brighter
Finally I need to map color value to something I can use on the site, so I ask for the 8-bit version of the color and I get a direct hexadecimal value - great

Update (2020-05-05)

Now’s a good time to update this, recently I’ve scaled up considerably the generation of colormaps on the blog which made one thing very clear, rmagick is not a good option in terms of performance - at least in it’s default form. So bad in fact that the colormap generation would either exhaust the VM’s resources or - after I tweaked a bunch of imagemagick settings - take 5 minutes or more to generate all the colormaps.

Anyway, I looked at doing everything from libvips - as part of the updates I did - but I couldn’t find an obvious path to do that so I stuck to imagemagick but I now call it via a mogrified command using MiniMagick. The updated code looks like this now

class Colormap
  NUMBER_OF_COLORS = 5

  def initialize(path, number_of_colors = NUMBER_OF_COLORS)
    @image = MiniMagick::Image.open(path)
    @path  = path
    @number_of_colors = number_of_colors
  end

  def colors
    @image
      .run_command(
        'convert',
        @path,
        '-resize', '256x256',
        '-quantize', 'sRGB',
        '-format', '%c',
        '-colors', @number_of_colors,
        '-dither', 'Riemersma',
        '-depth', 8,
        'histogram:info:'
      )
      .split("\n")                               # One line per color
      .map { |v| /(\#[A-Z\d]*)/.match(v).to_s }  # Match anything that looks like #ACOLOR1
  end
end

Go with this instead, same results - scalling the image down also brings performance benefits .

Now, there’s one important detail regarding the process of reducing the colors, which is the color space we want imagemagick to work in, which you can sort of get a feel for what it’s doing here. I played around with this for a while - in an impressive display of color theory ignorance - and I ended up going back to the RGB colorspace as that seem to give me the best results. Here’s how the experiments went:

Reducing using the CMYK colorspace

Reducing using the HSL colorspace

Reducing using the Lab colorspace

Reducing using the YIQ colorspace

Reducing using the YUV colorspace

Reducing using the SRGB colorspace - this is the one I used

And then ?

So with this I can now inject a list of colors onto each post. With these I do two things:

I added a color bar at the bottom of the image header so I can see the results. This is the typical case of a debugging tool that was promoted to “this is what I wanted all along”

I change the colors of the navigation and the post title block to match the colors of the image. Namely I take the brightest and the darkest and that influences the color of the text and background. This also means that now I have to make sure I pick images with enough contrast for this to always work out well in terms of readability, but there’s nothing I don’t do to make it more difficult for me to do things #SelfSabotage101

Here are a few examples:

Next up?

A MAJOR DESIGN OVERHAUL OF COURSE!!!!!!!

Google Lunar XPRIZE

david@ragingnexus.com (David Ramalho) — Mon, 07 May 2018 00:00:00 +0100

Almost a year later I got around to reading this: The Next Moon Landing Is Near—Thanks to These Pioneering Engineers

I hardly ever read stuff on the computer, it’s too geared towards multitasking - as am I in the sense that my attention span is degraded - and as soon as I see that an article is both long and interesting I fire it off to Pocket.

In order for me to read said article I used to have a Calibre that would collect and archive my oldest unread articles and build a readable digest, which was great as I could push it to my kindle - the least multitasking device ever - but changes to the Pocket API - and the tricks the recipe used to play - meant that stopped working, so the backlog reading stopped for a while, it was only when I lost all shame and started borrowing my wife’s iPad that I found another weak-multitasking device that I could use, so we’re kind of getting back on track.

Now, reading old articles has a lot of interesting benefits, for one you remove anxiety from the equation as chances are, whatever cliffhanger or open question the article raised is answered now - or died in a cloud of empty silence. Which is the other benefit, you get to follow up and find out what happened, and in this case let’s talk about the Google Lunar XPRIZE

At the time the article ran, five teams were in play to win the award. In this last stage they needed to launch and successfully operate the vehicles to fulfil the prize requisites. None made it within the deadline and on January 2018 it was announced that the monetary award would end unclaimed, although later on in April a second announcement came up that the award would continue to run as a non-cash competition despite which the organisation continues to look for other sponsors.

So what of the teams then?

Moon Express - USA - is the Silicon Valley finalist (which you know straight away by reading their entires of course :)). They have a multi-launch contract with Rocket Lab USA and 4 different vehicle configurations. From their timeline it looks like they’re aiming for a 2019 launch of their MX-1 configuration and 2020 for their MX-2.

Synergy Moon was the product of several teams partnering up for the contest. Plans were made for a launch before the deadline but they didn’t pan out. They’re now aiming for a late 2008 joint launch with another team.

TeamIndus - India - is planing a 30 day mission with a rover that’s expected to live stream from the surface of the moon. It’s expected to launch late 2018 alongside Synergy Moon

SpaceIL - Israel - is aiming to launch a 500kg spacecraft using SpaceX’s Falcon 9 . For now they seem to be trying to raise the remaining funds to aim for a late 2018 launch

Finally Hakuto - Japan - who are now aiming for a 2020 Atlas V rocket joint launch.

We’re probably not there yet in terms of actual cheap and reliable technology to do what the XPRIZE expected, but we’ve come a long long way from the times of needing a super-power’s national budget to do it.

It’s unclear if any of the teams will even attempt a launch, but we’ll certainly look forward to more news this year.

It feels like we’re on the brink of a new chapter of space exploration, one with multiple players and competition. SpaceX has sort of brought a new fire into the field - no pun intended - especially for us, casual spectators, but it also seems to have ignited - sigh - a race to commoditise launches, which really, is a gigantic enabler for the above projects.

NASA turning it’s focus and budget again towards the Moon will also fuel - sigh - technological innovation and stability .

Hopefully the next 10 years will be very exciting in this area