Category: Learning

This isn’t entirely data-related, but it’s fascinating to read the claims against Google. Here is the full text of the suit (with mild redactions). @PatrickMcGee_ dives into the details on Twitter (link goes to ThreadReaderApp), as does @fasterthanlime.

It’s important to keep in mind that these are allegations not yet proved, and Google’s lawyers will get their chance to respond. But, because Google’s not giving me any money to shill for them, I will say that this looks bad for them. Assuming these allegations are close to accurate, there’s some pretty blatant abuse of monopoly power.

Krishna Doss Mohan and Jann Skotdal take us through the evolution of Microsoft Translator:

Today, we’re excited to announce that Microsoft Translator has added 12 new languages and dialects to the growing repertoire of Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services Translator, bringing us to a total of 103 languages!

The new languages, which are natively spoken by 84.6 million people, are Bashkir, Dhivehi, Georgian, Kyrgyz, Macedonian, Mongolian (Cyrillic), Mongolian (Traditional), Tatar, Tibetan, Turkmen, Uyghur, and Uzbek (Latin). With this release, the Translator service can translate text and documents to and from languages natively spoken by 5.66 billion people worldwide.

I’ve used the live translation service a few times. It’s a little clunky but it does work pretty well.

Maria Zakourdaev wants to measure agility:

Do you want to visualize your RnD team performance to drive business value? Is there anything that is slowing down your development pipeline? How agile is your team? How long are your customers waiting for the features?

There are many things that can hold you back. Backlog management, code review delays, resources provisioning, manual testing and deployment automation efficiency. In this article I will show you my method of measuring one of the metrics described in this book called LeadTime.

Read on to see how you can do this.

Bob Pusateri describes a common promotion path:

But one piece of career growth that I’ve never gotten from any employer is a promotion.

Allow me to define “promotion”. In my mind, a promotion is where an employee earns a change in job title with commensurate increase in responsibility. I won’t even say it has to include an increase in pay, though I imagine it often would. Similarly, a promotion need not involve moving into a management position. Simply put, to me a promotion is doing a great job as a junior widget maker and then one day being told your hard work and contributions have been noticed and you are no longer junior.

This is pretty common. As an example of the other side of the coin, I’ve been promoted (using Bob’s definition) at two separate companies. But in a lot of cases, hierarchies in engineering teams have nearly disappeared, such that there’s no longer a Software Developer 1 who can be promoted into a Software Developer 2, and then a 3 and a 4, and then an Enterprise Architect 1, etc. Instead, out is the new up.

The funny part of the pattern is that I know people who have left a company in order to move up. Then, after some time with the new company, they return to the old company in a higher role.

Cathrine Wilhelmsen shares a tip for improving those presentation skills:

Did you know that PowerPoint can help you improve your presentation skills? 💡 If you rehearse with the PowerPoint Presenter Coach, you can get real-time feedback on things like your pace and language. If that’s too distracting (it is for me), you can choose to hide the real-time feedback and only view the detailed report at the end of your rehearsal.

The report shows you details about the total time spent, your pace and pitch over time, whether or not you are simply reading from your slides, as well as actionable feedback on your language. The feedback includes whether you are using too many filler words (like umm, actually, or you know), whether you are using too many repetitive words with alternatives you can use instead, whether you are using any words that can be offensive, and specific sentences that you can refine.

Click through for more details.

Julia Evans catalogs things to avoid when providing explanations:

This list isn’t meant to make you feel bad about your writing. I’ve probably done all of these things! I’m certainly going to do them again! I even did at least one of them while writing this post!

But knowing that I’m likely to accidentally do these things makes it easier for me to avoid them, and it makes me more receptive to critique when people point out issues with my writing (“Julia, this is assuming a lot of knowledge that I don’t have!“).

Being aware of these patterns also helps me when reading a confusing explanation: “oh, I’m not confused by this explanation because I’m stupid, I’m confused because it’s introduced 6 new-to-me concepts and it hasn’t explained what any of them is yet!“.

Read on for the list and some excellent explanations of what to do and what to avoid when trying to explain things clearly to people.

Kenneth Fisher airs some grievances:

Many years ago I was given a work request that literally just said:

It’s broke. Fix it.

I’m sure you can see how that is supremely unhelpful. And this isn’t the only time I’ve gotten such great requests.

Kenneth has some great advice here when framing requests and I have just one more thing to add: err on the side of using nouns over pronouns, even when it feels repetitive. “I was in the XYZ service and when I clicked the button, it stopped working” is a mess of an error report because it could refer to the service, to the button, or to some third thing which you have in mind but never wrote down.