Week in review 2023-01-09

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This is an automated issue to track the weekly post for luisnatera.com/blog. The issue works as a repository for the links and thoughts to be published by the end of the week.

This is a first step in automating the publication process, the second step is to retrive the comments from the issue and create, automatically, the post and publish it.

Things to cover in the weekly post

• [ ] 🗓 Overview of the week
• [ ] 🐦 On Twitter
• [ ] 📼 Youtube
• [ ] 🧑‍💻 Around the web

[nateraluis]

about Last week was full of multiple activities, getting together with friends, sports, and work. This year I'm trying to get back to the office two days per week, it is good to change environment and get to see more people. I hugely value having the opportunity to work from remotely from, and with a distributed team. But certainly, there is no substitution to the random encounters in the office and the chats while having a coffee.

On the developing side I continue to work on Django as part of a team building a web application. Last week also included some debugging and maintenance for a previous project, it was a good reminder about how useful it is to have tests in place for the code. One can go back at it after some months, make some changes, and test that nothing gets broken in the process. Following such approach can seems slow in the beginning, and for some none developers, can seem like a waste of time, specially when having deadlines, but it the long term it saves time to have a tested code, it also helps a lot to find and track bugs. And speaking of bugs, this week while dealing with one issue, I follow a walking solution, just went out for a little bit, take some steps and fresh air, and when I came back to the desk the mistake, and solution, were obvious. Never underestimate the power of moving away from the code to clear the head.

From the cities realm, I wrote an issue for the newsletter about the 15-minutes cities movement and how software and location intelligence can play an important role to evaluate the current urban conditions of a given city, and help to find optimal solutions. If you have not read it, you can give it a read here.

Along this week I collected a list of interesting links and resources, give them a look, hope you enjoy them.

[nateraluis]

twitter Stop motion video of the construction of an underwater parking facility for 6,300 bikes next to Amsterdam central station. // The combination of rail and bicycles allows people to commute between cities, and keep traveling by bikes. Impressive to see the video of the construction.

[nateraluis]

web Cities need to realize the value of emotional design. // A Weird column on the importance of taking into consideration emotions while designing for the city. I agree with it, having good design that invites people to be out, is a good approach to build community, thus have safer cities. Together with climate change and the need of cities to adapt to it, the trend described in the column will begin to accelerate.

[nateraluis]

mastodon Ethan Zuckerman shared a link about twitter suspending the service to cities accounts. // As Ethan points out, one should question "Why did we trust our services to privately own platforms in the first place?" You can read the full article here.

[nateraluis]

weeknotes Jochen's week notes 2023-01-09