In honor of Learning inDay (and at the end of ICCDW_, no less) I figured I’d follow the lead of my past self and post a handful of links to some things I’ve _ found educational.

First off, we’ve got this article on Why Do Things Go Right? Authored in 2018, this one has been sitting in my igotw “scratch list” of ideas to write about for quite a while now. The gist: things are working the vast majority of the time, so why do we only invest in postmortems/retrospectives for when things go wrong (which is only 0.01% of the time, if availability numbers are to be believed).

Next is Lessons Learned From the Migration to Confluent Kafka, a write-up by an engineer at Honeycomb about a migration that didn’t exactly go to plan. The irony of listing this immediately after the previous article is not lost on me…but I mostly just like the nifty radar/spider charts (and in fact, this very article is the reason I know what those kinds of charts are named in the first place).

Then we’ve got The Ingenious Design of the Aluminum Beverage Can - a YouTube video about…well…just that. Clocking in at 11:38, I started this video thinking “No way I make it past a minute, minute-thirty tops)…and then proceeded to watch the whole-ass thing twice. The lesson here: the engineering behind everyday items we take for granted is just fucking incredible.

If you’re looking to brush up on your writing skills, this relatively short read on Writing for Engineers has a few good tips and tricks. I don’t necessarily agree with everything he says - I think writing is a subjective enough experience that I wouldn’t agree with 100% of the advice of any author - but the majority of it resonates. A little “trick” I picked up somewhere along the way that aligns with the point on “Make your text skimable”: if the thing I’m writing goes beyond a certain number of paragraphs, I’ll go back and refactor my writing such that reading only the first sentence of each paragraph should give the reader a reasonably complete and coherent summary version of the text.

Finally, there’s That Annoying Shade of Blue. This one originally caught my eye (see what I did there?) because the author started off talking about NetHack , but left me with a better understanding of console colors and the biology of the human eye. I also really like his human-centric framing of what constitutes a “bug” in the context of HCI and a11y.

Bonus: TIL that the term used for a word abbreviated by replacing letters with the number of letters (as in a11y, k8s, et al) is “numeronym”. My absolute favorite part of that wikipedia article:

According to Tex Texin, the first numeronym of this kind was “S12n”, the electronic mail account name given to Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) employee Jan Scherpenhuizen by a system administrator because his surname was too long to be an account name.”

Happy inDay, folks. Get out there and learn something!