Boundaries Are Meant to Be Pushed

We define a lot of our world in terms of boundaries. Besides physical ones we have a whole load of immaterial ones. Maybe the most interesting of these are personal ones as they put some limits to what we believe we can do. But that doesn't mean boundaries cannot be pushed.

I was in a very poor shape physically a decade ago. Then one day I decided I must do something about it. You only have one chance to at it. Why not to spend it healthy? Based on this decision I started pushing my boundaries. One step at a time. I started with short walks to develop a routine. No matter what the weather was, I went out there for my half or even an hour walk a couple of times a week. The key thing was to keep on pushing.

As I kept pushing I started discovering new things like the forest nearby. I took up skiing and started to venture around. I even got a fancy road bike that I absolutely love. I discovered trail running and a hidden tribe of superathletes. I ditched my expensive trainers in favor of light "trail gloves". As a result my flat feet gained perfect arch and my feet are now in better shape than ever.

Last year I began getting into foraging seriously. I was missing out all that time. The nature is full of treats if you know where to look for. I took up on art again and keep on improving. Now I'm in process of exploring Italian kitchen even though I haven't cooked seriously before.

It is amazing how much you can miss if you don't push and just settle for what you have. Even one tiny push every day can take you to places you could never imagine. Maybe that's one of the secrets of a good life?

Linkdump 19 - Business, Software Development, Art...

It has been a while since the previous linkdump so here we go again.

Business

• Entering the Information Age
• The Sustainability Agenda in Kanban
• Tesla and Adobe: Why Continuous Deployment May Mean Continuous Customer Disappointment
• Why we make up jobs out of thin air
• Finland Has A Shyness Problem
• Lessons from the World's Most Tech-Savvy Government
• Companies Are Actually Belief Systems in Disguise
• Everyone Should Be an Executive

Culture

• Building a High-Trust Culture, #1: It Starts with Integrity
• 5 People Who Destroy Your Culture
• Is It Possible to Separate a Company from Its Culture?

Marketing

• The Marketer’s Guide to Google Analytics: How to Extract Numbers That Drive Action
• How To Reach Your Target Audience By Not Marketing To Them

Startups

• Ignore posterity; build features
• From Angry Birds to Nokia alums, Finland's startup scene has huge ambitions
• 10 awesome tools a happy startup shouldn’t live without
• 10-Month-Old Startup Buys 93-Year-Old Business for $100 Million
• 4 Common Misconceptions About “Lean Startup”
• The Billion-Dollar Startup Club - Only three europeans on the list.
• You Can’t Will Things Into Existence
• Tab: Startup To Shutdown

Software Development

• DNA seen through the eyes of a coder - Scientists also discovered double meaning in genetic code incidentally.
• The Birth of Standard Error
• The Taxonomy of Terrible Programmers
• More Communication, Less Documentation
• Apprenticeship Patterns
• Are you experiencing technical drift?
• A Rockstar Programmer Isn't the Same Thing as a Smart Asshole
• Programmers, Teach Non-Geeks The True Cost of Interruptions
• The other kind of software debt
• How many software developers would it take to change a lightbulb?
• What's Wrong with Software Development?
• So Long Scrum, Hello Kanban

Git

• Git: the NoSQL Database
• Git tips from the trenches
• Think Like (a) Git
• Git logs to JSON

Techniques

• How to Write Unmaintainable Code and Ensure a Job for Life
• Building a tiny ARM-based server
• Reversing Sinclair's amazing 1974 calculator hack - half the ROM of the HP-35
• Bogobogosort - If you thought bogosort was slow, try this.

Personal Development

• What Makes People Do What They Do?
• Money and Wealth
• Why Your Creativity Needs Boundaries to Thrive?
• Forget Ideas. Focus on Execution.
• Why Am I So Lucky? Why You Need to Be Sure You’re Not the Sucker
• The two brain systems that control our attention: The science of gaining focus
• Where’s Your F Chord? What Guitar Teaches Us About the Quest for Mastery
• The more you have, the more you have to…

Work

• A Moment to Breathe
• The Builder's High
• 37 Signal’s Formula for a Satisfying Career (Hint: It’s Not Passion)
• Your 60-Hour Work Week Is Not A Badge Of Honour
• Why I Don't Do Unpaid Overtime and Neither Should You
• Success at Work, Failure at Home

Web Development

• Getting Started with Ansible
• Scaling Isomorphic Javascript Code
• DDos Mitigation
• Best Practices for Building Embeddable Widgets
• 404 with attitude
• The Case for Secrecy in Web Experiments
• Free email validation API for web forms - Please, don't try to regex this.
• 4 HTTP Security Headers You Should Always Be Using

Angular.js

• Handling Oauth2 with Node.js and Angular.js - Passport to the rescue!
• Don't Fear Directives in Angular.js - See also befundoo's tutorial about directives
• Native drag and drop in Angular.js
• Rapid AngularJS Prototyping Without Real Backend
• Cookies vs Tokens. Getting auth right with Angular.js

CSS

• Vertical align anything with just 3 lines of CSS
• The Complete Guide to Centering a Div
• CSS Regions Considered Harmful
• What You May Not Know About the Z-Index Property
• Wow such responsive layout

Node.js

• Vert.x and Why It's Better Than Node.js
• Monolithic Node.js

UX

• Library of Design Triggers by Zurb
• Progress Buttons Prevent Duplicate Form Submissions
• Usability Checklist
• How Undo Timers Can Save Users from Embarrassment
• How to Make Sure Users Don’t Accidentally Delete

Computer Graphics

• Fluid dynamics showreel
• Fairly realistic snow
• How to generate a random snowflake
• Flexible Muscle-Based Locomotion for Bipedal Creatures

Games

• Polygonal Map Generation for Games
• Insert Coin to Continue: The HTML5 Game Sponsorship Market
• How much do indie PC devs make, anyways? (Part V)
• Flappy Space Program
• Flappy Bird Solved Using Reinforcement Learning
• How In-app Purchases Have Destroyed The Industry
• Reverse Engineering Strike Commander

Art

• James Perry Wilson's En Plein Air Paintings
• Parallax Animation Brings Stills to Life
• Norman Rockwell Warred with Trolls
• The Cliffs of Frazetta
• Masterpieces - Animated
• Initials
• That Knob on Mort Drucker's Lamp
• Pencil vs. Camera Goes Huge: 3D Charcoal and Pencil Drawings by Ben Heine
• Sargent watercolor techniques: Five observations

blogger2ghost - Now Available as a Service

If you have been following my blog, you might have noticed I wrote a little tool to convert your Blogger blog content into Ghost compatible format.

Besides making a few small adjustments to the tool (better tag handling primarily) I launched it as a service so it's easier to use. You should check out blogger2ghost.com!

The source code is available in case you want to poke it or see how I did it.

Business - Companies Are Actually Belief Systems in Disguise

No matter where we go, we always bring our beliefs with us. At greatest they allow us to achieve magnificent things and ignite a whole nation to visit the Moon. They can also chain us and prevent us from growing as people.

In a previous post of mine I discussed the concept of company culture. To summarize it is impossible to separate company from its culture. Each company has one whether it wanted it or not. But what are cultures and companies actually made of? Beliefs.

How Beliefs Work?

Belief systems rule the world and always have. We have beliefs about ourselves and others. This applies on personal and even geographical level. We apply certain filters depending on our context. That is the purpose of beliefs after all, to allow us to judge without judging and make fast decisions on a whim. Even though it can save a lot of time it comes with a cost. It is too easy to get stuck on obsolete beliefs and make rash judgments.

As companies, except holding ones, are made of people, this applies particularly on company level. Companies might claim to have values, mission, vision, whatnot, but how the people of the company actually feel and believe matter. The culture of the company is created by its people. But the way they create it is through their beliefs.

Cultural Fit and Boundaries

This is the reason why cultural fit is so important. The belief systems have to be compatible somehow. It is definitely possible to end up with multiple cultures within a company. One way to achieve this is to split the company in departments and let them deal with it. Another classic way to do this is to assign roles to people. There can be programmers, designers, project managers, whatnot.

Each role comes with a set of beliefs attached to it. People might believe for instance that programmers can't design or designers can't program. Or that Photoshop is a good communication tool for these parties. It all depends on our beliefs and the resulting culture.

Beliefs can be used to create artificial boundaries like these. They can also be used to ignite the whole company and give it a purpose. That is why many companies have a fancy mission and vision statement. In practice all that matters is that are the people of the company living those and believing them.

Conclusion

Beliefs can be a great boon when used right. They also limit us. Acknowledging our beliefs is the first step towards changing them. It can help to understand where they stem from. We take some beliefs for granted as wisdom of the ancients. But as times change, so must beliefs and as a result, companies. What do you believe in?