Assessing London

I came back yesterday from the UK. I visited London, Edinburgh, and spent one night in Glasgow. 

I totally enjoyed the trip. Being in a place where everyone speaks English makes a big difference. Also the British are more smiley, chatty, and socially aware than the vibe I am getting in Berlin.

Maybe the socially aware point is a bit vague. It is hard to explain but for me it is being aware of the surrounding and proactively managing the situation. I normally observe this feeling in how/when people offer their help with something.

On the flip side the three cities I visited are far behind in infrastructure compared to Berlin. London public transit system is not accessible. Buses are small, allowing them to take maximum one wheelchair at a time. In Berlin buses are bigger, can take two, sometimes three wheelchairs at the same time.

London tube is much worse. The default is non-accessible stops. In a big city like London, it makes things much harder for people like myself.

I imagine the accessible housing situation is equally bad. Most of the city is old. Berlin is still being built which creates more accessible housing opportunities for people such as myself.

I still loved it, but not sure if I would want to live there. I normally look for three factors when assessing a new city.

1) Career Opportunities

I believe London wins on that one. The big 5 have development offices there. There are more startup deals and funding than any other European city.

2) People accessibility

London wins because of the language. I do understand the arguments of people being easy on the outside and hard on the inside. But I still think if one understands the language, it becomes a question of the effort you put into blending with the people around you.

3) Accessibility

Berlin wins by big margin. And it is getting even better over time.

I am not thinking of moving, but for me this was a good eye opener into the London situation and what are the options if I decided to move out of Berlin.

Accessible British Bathrooms

One thing I don’t understand about accessible bathrooms in the UK is their insistence on having a tiny sink, and placing it too close to the toilet. I can’t think of a reason for such a bad design and it is totally unusable.

Yak Shaving

I was in a planning meeting few weeks ago and one of my colleagues said something wasn’t done because the team was “Yak Shaving”. We didn’t understand so we googled it during the meeting and this is what we found

Yak shaving is programming lingo for the seemingly endless series of small tasks that have to be completed before the next step in a project can move forward.

Then he said I have a very good video that explains what it is. We also played it in the meeting.

https://youtu.be/AbSehcT19u0

This was funny.

Short random thoughts

I don’t have time to write much but I want to keep up with the habit. So here is a short random thoughts post.

These days I am thinking about London and comparing it a lot to Berlin. It is really good to be in a place that speaks English but the public transit system sucks in terms of wheelchair accessibility.

I am thinking about self censorship. I delete many thoughts after writing them. I don’t know how much self censorship is good or bad but I think I am doing more censorship than necessary.

I am reflecting on my decision to delete Facebook in 2015. Before Trump became a president, and before GDPR. It is one of the best decisions I made but I didn’t think enough of its impact. This needs another post.

I might elaborate more on those points later. I might not. But right now, those are my random thoughts.

Hello London

I am in London for a short visit. It is my first time.

It feels good to be in a place where English is the default.

I always say I am operating at 50% of my social capacity in Germany because of the language.

It feels different when you understand what’s happening around you. The signs, the announcements, and the side talks.

Unique Pageviews

I don’t check this blog’s analytics often. I do it every few months. I was curious to know which posts/pages are read the most this year. This is the data since 1st of January until today.

Scalability of ethics

I was watching Peter Thiel interview with Dave Rubin. Part of the interview was Thiel talking about seasteading, a libertarian Utopia he wants to build in the middle of the sea.

The first thing that came to mind upon hearing this was Talib’s “ethics don’t scale” argument from Skin in the Game.

There is also

A libertarian Utopia can not scale, or it will turn into a dictatorship or something else.

That’s one of the reasons I don’t understand humanists that keep saying we are all one. No we are not. We are different. There are infinite factors that determine our position in society and our life path. We can’t control for most of those factors. We live with other human beings. They have different desires and incentives. They have different genes. Their ethics are different. They act differently.

The only way we can all be one is in a dystopian world. A world in which we are all trapped together having to abide by rules dictating we all should behave in a certain way. In such a world I will probably be unconscious. This makes life meaningless. And I don’t want to live a meaningless life. Sorry, we are not one.

Quality through quantity

A friend was telling me I am writing a lot recently. I told him I try to do it daily. Then he went into the whole discussion of quantity vs quality.

Writing is a muscle. You need to train it to get better at it. It is also a habit, you need to form it. 

By doing it often you get to a point where you can write high quality pieces easily. You achieve quality through quantity.

Don’t forget your booking

We were discussing how the favicon should report the status of a deployment pipeline, and I showed my team the following example from Booking.com

Once you land on the Booking page of the website, the title says “Your Details”

If you leave the tab, it changes to “Don’t forget your booking”
And if you wait longer, it turns into yellow and adds (1) to signal something like a notification

This is master persuasion. Even the smallest thing like the favicon and tab title can have a big impact.