123dev #39: Skills, stories, and software every dev should know

I twice had lunch with Ed Catmull at Disney and I asked him if there was anything that surprised him about managing people. He said he was surprised how well people can game rules and metrics for their own benefit.

The above gif may or may not be real, but also speaks to people manipulating perception for—maybe—their benefits.

Goodhart’s law

This article talks about why measurements being turned into targets is a bad idea. Through lots of research, DORA observed some metrics that indicated high performing output. Making the metrics the goal is a good way to not achieve the desired outcome.

This new website is handy if you need to test nginx configurations. The write-up for how Julia created the site is even better.

This is a really cool website to transfer files or share text between two computers—or mobile devices—on your LAN. It’s even better that you can host it yourself and the code is available on GitHub.

The server code is less than 300 lines of javascript and neat to read through to understand more about how it works.