Irreal

What’s the secret of building great teams? Google researchers decided to find out. They presumed that the ideal team would have a mix of varied skills and personalities. As they put it,

“We were pretty confident that we’d find the perfect mix of individual traits and skills necessary for a stellar team – take one Rhodes Scholar, two extroverts, one engineer who rocks at AngularJS, and a PhD.”

It turns out, though, that none of that was correct. The most important factor by far is that the team members feel psychologically safe to take risks and be vulnerable in front of each other. There are four other attributes too. Read the article—it’s short—to get the details. It’s very interesting and, if you’re a team leader, reports on some important and actionable research.

UPDATE: Added missing link.

Via Karl Voit:

Related: Visiting a potential employer? Check the toilets. Singly-ply sandpaper says a lot about their actual values.

— Bernd Haug (@xaibeha) November 23, 2015

It seems a little silly at first but, really, it serves as a good proxy for an employer’s attitude about its employees.

We’ve all seen them, either in person or in courtroom dramas. Those odd looking little machines that appear more like old fashioned adding machines rather than typewriters. I’m talking, of course, about steno machines. They’re used to provide verbatim transcripts of court and other legal proceedings.

When you look at them, there doesn’t appear to be enough keys to let the stenographer capture all the words that might be spoken. If you’re like me, you’ve probably idly wondered how they work and why they’re fast enough to let the stenographer to keep up with oral testimony. It’s certainly knowable but never seemed worth doing the research to find out how they work.

Fortunately, Xah Lee has come to our rescue for a helpful page on steno machines and how they work. It both simpler and more complex than you might have believed. If you have any curiosity about the matter at all, be sure to take a look at Lee’s post.

Of course, Lee being Lee, he explores the question of how the same techniques might make our interactions with computers more efficient. He also considers whether something similar could be done with a standard keyboard on a computer. I’d be surprised if anyone reading these words ever has a need to operate a steno machine or substitute but it is interesting to learn how they work and to consider what we might learn from them.

If you spend a lot of time using your terminal to log into remote machines, you are probably aware of GNU Screen and tmux. If you aren’t using one of these, you should definitely check them out. They work nicely with Emacs and can make your remote sessions easier and more enjoyable.

Screen is the older program—it was initially released in 1989—and until recently development was stalled. In 2014 Amadeusz Sławiński took over the maintainership and released a new version. Tmux, released in 2009, is the newcomer but has captured much of the mindshare of late.

Karl Voit, whose work Irreal has mentioned before, recently switched from Screen to tmux and wrote a post describing his experience. The TL;DR is that the conversion was smooth and that he was able to configure tmux to have the same key sequences as Screen. If you’re considering switching from Screen to tmux or using one for the first time, you should read Voit’s post. It has a lot of useful information to get you going.