Links: In praise of normal engineers

In Praise of “Normal” Engineers: A software engineer argues against the myth of the “10x engineer” by Charity Majors.

The best engineering orgs are not the ones with the smartest, most experienced people in the world. They’re the ones where normal software engineers can consistently make progress, deliver value to users, and move the business forward.

Old CSS, new CSS by eevee a.k.a. evelyn woods. "I’m here to tell all of you to get off my lawn. Here’s a history of CSS and web design, as I remember it."

every core unix command I use and mega terminal cheat sheet by Julia Evans @bork@jvns.ca

20 years of Git. Still weird, still wonderful. by Scott Chacon.

Normalization of deviance by Dan Luu.

Have you ever mentioned something that seems totally normal to you only to be greeted by surprise? Happens to me all the time when I describe something everyone at work thinks is normal. For some reason, my conversation partner's face morphs from pleasant smile to rictus of horror. Here are a few representative examples.

There's the company that is perhaps the nicest place I've ever worked, combining the best parts of Valve and Netflix. The people are amazing and you're given near total freedom to do whatever you want. But as a side effect of the culture, they lose perhaps half of new hires in the first year, some voluntarily and some involuntarily. Totally normal, right? Here are a few more anecdotes that were considered totally normal by people in places I've worked. And often not just normal, but laudable.

Links: folk music archives

Balkan Folk Music Archive. Heather Meeker scanned in a huge archive of Balkan folk sheet music and made it available on this website.

Open Digital Archive, collections of memory items preserved by Armenian families all around the world, as well as concise microhistories of these families. Includes a video, Legends of Armenian kef Music, a history of Armenian American music by Ara Dinkjian. I've been looking for an Armenian recording I remember that included the melody from the beginning of Bach's Musette, with men singing "Ha, hey hey hey" on the fourth measure, and someone pointed me to this site. So far no luck finding it.

The Sound of Greek by Angelos Kanlis. Extremely geeky technical breakdown of Greek phonology.

Learn the Georgian alphabet by Apprenti Polyglotte, a friendly, hands-on series of pages to help learn the Georgian alphabet.