Posts by John Tornow

From Matthew Panzarino at TechCrunch:

Apple and Google’s engineering teams have banded together to create a decentralized contact tracing tool that will help individuals determine whether they have been exposed to someone with COVID-19.

Contact tracing is a useful tool that helps public health authorities track the spread of the disease and inform the potentially exposed so that they can get tested. It does this by identifying and “following up with” people who have come into contact with a COVID-19-affected person.

The first phase of the project is an API that public health agencies can integrate into their own apps. The next phase is a system-level contact tracing system that will work across iOS and Android devices on an opt-in basis.

The system uses on-board radios on your device to transmit an anonymous ID over short ranges — using Bluetooth beaconing. Servers relay your last 14 days of rotating IDs to other devices, which search for a match. A match is determined based on a threshold of time spent and distance maintained between two devices.

If a match is found with another user that has told the system that they have tested positive, you are notified and can take steps to be tested and to self-quarantine.

This is great news. Any system like this will need deep integration into the operating systems to be effective. Third-party apps can implement some nice features, but the platform itself has to be on board for more widespread adoption. It’s nice to see the two big players in the mobile space cooperating on this level.

They have already started to release some documentation and notes about the APIs. This should be an exciting space to watch over the next few months.

Three weeks down. Who knows how many more to go? We are a bit over three weeks into our family’s social distancing. I’m not sure what to call it really, but we’re staying home and not interacting with anyone outside of the house except for an occasional run to the grocery store. Or to get tequila.

Three weeks ago our schools were still open. Restaurants were still open. There was toilet paper and packs of eggs in stores. If you were sick you could buy Tylenol and Advil. Hospitals had beds available. We were excited to start a new season of tee-ball and I was looking forward to the start of baseball, March Madness, and The Masters.

What a difference that three weeks make. We decided to pull our kids out of school before spring break and they haven’t returned since, and probably won’t finish out the school year. Our county announced a shelter-in-place order requiring everyone to stay home until at least May 20th. March Madness was completely canceled, The Masters is delayed (but probably canceled) and even the Olympics for this year are postponed until next summer. It feels like the whole world is on pause.

For the most part, our time as a family has been great. We’ve never spent this much time all together, and likely never will again. I’ve heard it takes humans a little more than three weeks to develop new habits and routines. This time doesn’t feel new any more and it feels like we’ve established our new routines. We’re slowly figuring out how to do home schooling. We’re adjusting to not being around friends and having things to do outside of our neighborhood. We’re finding new things to cook at home and creative ways to pass the extra time. I’m truly thankful for this time together as a family. As long as the Internet doesn’t go out, we’re doing just fine over here.

I’m anxious about the world around us. I see our family, and others we know, doing everything we can do to prevent the spread of this virus but it’s not enough. There are so many people around us that do not seem to understand what’s going on. They’re playing and interacting like nothing has changed and burying their heads in the sand. I heard one older Texas man say that “we all need to just put on our big boy pants and get on with life.” We continue to have awkward conversations with people about how we can’t meet up for a certain activity now how they can’t come visit right now. I don’t feel like I should have to explain, but I still do. It feels like we’re the ones doing something wrong, and the rest of the world is moving on without us sometimes. But that’s not the case. I know it’s not the case, and soon I hope everyone will understand it as well.

So three weeks down, and on to the next. April is going to be an interesting month. Stay safe out there.

Bill Gates in The Washington Post this week:

There's no question the United States missed the opportunity to get ahead of the novel coronavirus. But the window for making important decisions hasn't closed. The choices we and our leaders make now will have an enormous impact on how soon case numbers start to go down, how long the economy remains shut down and how many Americans will have to bury a loved one because of covid-19.

Through my work with the Gates Foundation, I've spoken with experts and leaders in Washington and across the country. It's become clear to me that we must take three steps.

Very clear and reasonable steps.

It seems about time for the leadership in this country to get its act together and start taking control of this. I’m looking at you too, Texas.

Jahanzeb Sherwani announcing his new venture, Screen:

In 2013, I co-founded a company called Screenhero, which made an app that let pair programmers work together remotely. Through low-latency screen sharing and shared control, it let programmers code together on a Mac or Windows computer. Customers loved us, and voted with their wallets: once we started charging, we reached $1M in annual recurring revenue in 5 months. We had the choice of staying independent, but we opted to join forces with Slack, with the intention of embedding our product inside theirs, to reach more people faster than we could on our own.

In 2015, Slack acquired Screenhero, and I led the team that built Slack Calls: voice, video and screen sharing in Slack. We finally shipped interactive screen sharing almost three years later, but it wasn't as performant as Screenhero, and was eventually removed in 2019. Given that it was used by a tiny fraction of Slack's user-base, and had a high maintenance cost, this was the correct decision for Slack.

The old Screenhero was so great. Slack's video sharing was never the same and I'm so delighted these guys have returned with a new app.

I’m really enjoying this episode of Bill Simmons’ podcast with Eddie Vedder and Jeff Ament of Pearl Jam. Among all of the current crazy in the world it’s nice to hear about something different.

I love the stories of the old days and hearing their perspective on the crisis of the day. Remember when we took for granted that we could all gather in a large crowd and go see a concert together?

Speaking of working remotely from home ... Glenn Fleishman has a new (free) e-book: Take Control of Working from Home Temporarily.

We're in a time of unprecedented uncertainty. In the middle of a global viral outbreak, you were told or asked to work from home—and you've never or rarely had to be productive where you live before. What to do? We're here to take some stress out of your life with a new, free book that details how to set up a home office and balance work and home life for those not accustomed to it.

Some great suggestions on working from home by Matt Stauffer:

Today, I want to talk about remote work—especially right now, as so many people are unexpectedly being told/allowed to work from home—and how so much of it happens in less-than-ideal environments, and what we can do to make the best of it. I'll assume you're working from home, but many of these tips apply in other less-than-ideal remote work environments as well.

I agree with many of his tips. I've been working from home now for over 4 years and it took some getting used to in the beginning. Now I can't imagine anything else.

While working from home takes some getting used to and people may not be as productive as before we have to remember that we're still in the middle of a global crisis, and that doesn't make working easier regardless of your work location.

MonoLisa is a new coding-focused font by Marcus Sterz:

As software developers, we always strive for better tools but rarely consider font as such. Yet we spend most of our days looking at screens reading and writing code. Using a wrong font can negatively impact our productivity and lead to bugs. MonoLisa was designed by professionals to improve developers’ productivity and reduce fatigue.

I’m still partial to Operator from Hoefler & Co, but MonoLisa looks very well done.

Speaking of Github, this week it was also announced that Github (aka Microsoft) has acquired the de-facto package manager for JavaScript, npm.

Nat Friedman, on Github's blog:

npm is a critical part of the JavaScript world. The work of the npm team over the last 10 years, and the contributions of hundreds of thousands of open source developers and maintainers, have made npm home to over 1.3 million packages with 75 billion downloads a month. Together, they've helped JavaScript become the largest developer ecosystem in the world. We at GitHub are honored to be part of the next chapter of npm's story and to help npm continue to scale to meet the needs of the fast-growing JavaScript community.

On what's next:

Looking further ahead, we'll integrate GitHub and npm to improve the security of the open source software supply chain, and enable you to trace a change from a GitHub pull request to the npm package version that fixed it.

That sounds very cool. Excited to see that piece come together.

For this Mac-loving tech kid that grew up in the 90’s, I still cringe any time I hear Microsoft doing anything. But this is not the Microsoft of then. They’ve done well with Github so far. They’re doing amazing things with the cloud. I need to get over it. Hopefully this is a new great beginning for npm.

New this week: a brand new native iOS and Android app for Github. From what I can tell these are completely native apps. Maybe there’s some web embedded stuff in there, but if there is, I can’t tell and it’s super slick and fast. As it should be.

The app seems very well designed and thoroughly considered. Handy for managing Pull Requests and Issues on the go.

Very nice looking app for debugging network requests. Reminds me of the beautiful and powerful Paw app. I love that these little development and tech tools are being so well done lately, rather than having to use some awful cross-platform Java app. via Brent Simmons

Excellent video from Kurzgesagt on YouTube:

It's the number one trending video on YouTube today for good reason. This video clearly explains what we know so far about the SARS-CoV-2 virus and how it affects the human body.

(via Kottke)

Harry Stevens, at The Washington Post, with my favorite explanation from over the weekend of why this virus is so dangerous and how it spreads:

[...] these simulations vastly oversimplify the complexity of real life. Yet just as simulitis spread through the networks of bouncing balls on your screen, covid-19 is spreading through our human networks — through our countries, our towns, our workplaces, our families. And, like a ball bouncing across the screen, a single person's behavior can cause ripple effects that touch faraway people.

The visuals in this piece are excellent.

To no one's surprise, Apple announced today that this year's WWDC will be online-only due the "current health situation."

We are delivering WWDC 2020 this June in an innovative way to millions of developers around the world, bringing the entire developer community together with a new experience," said Phil Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. "The current health situation has required that we create a new WWDC 2020 format that delivers a full program with an online keynote and sessions, offering a great learning experience for our entire developer community, all around the world. We will be sharing all of the details in the weeks ahead.