"France has had the most native players and coaches in the last 4 World Cups… and their dominance has been on the rise. Players like Kylian Mbappe and Paul Pogba are the children of immigrants and the product of the French soccer academy system. French- born players have played for Togo, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Argentina, Portugal, and many more."

Surprised I only found this yesterday…!

"Refactoring.Guru is a shiny website where you can find tons of information on refactoring, design patterns, SOLID principles and other smart programming topics."

Excellent guide.

"One of the logical consequences of it is that you as a coach are not just responsible for a team. Instead, you are responsible for a set of players. So if you used to be an under-10 coach, now you are responsible for three under-10 players, two under-11 players, five under-12 players et cetera. Your main responsibility is to improve these players.

"Of course, you are still coaching a team on a Saturday but that is not your principal responsibility. We did this in order to take away this incentive for them to win. The players, of course, want to win. That is natural and in the DNA of every player. But a coach in the academy who wants to win at the expense of everything? That is bad.

"So we said that every eight weeks you have to change the team that you work with. The under-11 coach had to move to the under-9s after eight weeks, and maybe the under-9 coach would move to the under-12s. This way you exposed more and more coaches to the same players. This fostered the discussion process about players and their abilities.

"Before this, if a coach had been a striker, he could look at a player in a certain way. Another might look at them in a very different way. One coach might be very attuned to behavioural issues and another not so much. There are always situations where a coach does not like a player and does not pay them enough attention. Changing coaches regularly avoids this."

How to develop a perceptron using supervised learning.

“We are going to give Wicklow and Ireland something to be proud of where there will be an academy to rival the best in the world. Our vision and ,rest assured ,we will execute the delivery of our vision is a world class football academy to rival the best in the world.”

Avoid complecting.

"Choose simple tools. Write simple stuff. Simplify other people’s work by disentangle it."

"Simplicity is a choice. We have a culture of complexity. Avoid tools (languages, constructs, etc.) that generate complex outputs. Simple != easy. Look for complexity and avoid it. Reliability tools - testing, refactoring, type systems - are good but secondary. They do not enforce simplicity. They are just a safety net."

A summary of the announcements at Apple's annual WWDC event.

"The power of DL stems from the learning system’s ability to identify more relationships than humans can code in software, or relationships that humans might not even be able to perceive consciously. After sufficient training, the network of algorithms can begin to make predictions on, or interpretations of, very complex data.

In this post, I show you how to connect the workflow between the data scientists and DevOps. Using a number of AWS services, I take the output of a model’s training and deploy it to perform predictions in real time with low latency and high availability. In particular, I illustrate the ease of deploying DL predict functions using Apache MXNet (a deep learning library), Amazon ECS, Amazon S3, and Amazon ECR, Amazon developer tools, and AWS CloudFormation."

"iOS continues to haunt us. If you remember, 2016 was the year we killed Status Board, our very nice data visualization app. Now, a lot of it was our fault. But it was another blow to our heavy investment in pro-level iOS apps a couple years ago, a decision we’re still feeling the ramifications of today as we revert back to a deep focus on macOS. Trying to do macOS quality work on iOS cost us a lot of time for sadly not much payoff. We love iOS, we love our iPhones, and we love our iPads. But we remain convinced that it’s not — yet? — possible to make a living selling pro software on those platforms. Which is a real bummer!"

"Beautiful is better than ugly.
Explicit is better than implicit.
Simple is better than complex.
Complex is better than complicated.
Flat is better than nested.
Sparse is better than dense.
Readability counts.
Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules.
Although practicality beats purity.
Errors should never pass silently.
Unless explicitly silenced.
In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.
Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch.
Now is better than never.
Although never is often better than *right* now.
If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea.
If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.
Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those!"

"Artificial intelligence has already provided beneficial tools that are used every day by people around the world. Its continued development, guided by the following principles, will offer amazing opportunities to help and empower people in the decades and centuries ahead."

"The “questions” theme requires actual repression of a real instinct. I’m OK with that; it’s a lousy instinct. The idea is that by catching myself often enough, asking questions first will become the new habit."

"Create habits, not goals or resolutions."

Always be aware that alternative approaches exist. Believe that you don't know what you're doing.

Very interesting architecture.

"Vipassana means "to see things as they really are". It is a pre-Buddhist meditation technique that was revitalised and popularised by Gautama Buddha 2,500 years ago. The instructions, played out over the speakers, are straightforward: observe your breath for three days, then observe your body for seven. Simple, the way instructions for running a marathon can be made reductively simple: take a step or two; continue for 26.2 miles in a speedy fashion."

Interesting ideas for managing iOS app config.

Can't make much of the Spanish… but very interesting drill shown at the end which seems to focus on the timing of pressure (along with a bunch of examples of how not to do it in a match situation).

Smart design pattern of behaviours to hook into before and after an execution step.

"I feel there is a general worldwide process now of getting young players ready for first-team sport. We were talking about this recently at the Leaders in Performance conference. That’s a meeting between people from all sports, and everybody seems to have three main problems to sort out now. One is whether we specialize the players too early. By that I mean should we give them a multi-sports influence from a young age? The second issue is how we deal with the parents of young sportspeople today – that’s in every sport, you have to manage that in the right way. And thirdly, how do we integrate young sportspeople into the top level? Well we have just spoken all about the third point. The other issues to think about at the moment concern the parent; how to manage their anxiety, the demands on the players and the pressure on the players. So more and more now the clubs are developing structures to work well with the players’ parents too. But the big thing today is whether we should develop multi-sports at a younger age. Do we specialise too early? Because there can be a transfer of skills from one sport to another."

Interesting list:

- Balance
- Two-rootedness
- Scanning
- Cover shadows

I would add Triangles into that list, in (availability, depth

To develop, leave the comfort zone.

"Microinteractions act as facilitators for interactions, with feedback, notifications and instructions.
Microinteractions should save time by instantly communicating information in a way that doesn’t bore or distract the user. They should catch the user’s attention like a sly wink.
Knowing your users and the context behind the microinteractions will make them more precise and effective.
Microinteractions must survive long-term use. What seems fun the first time might become annoying after the 100th use.
Add humanity to the microinteraction and focus on visual harmony. The motion should feel fluid to make the microinteraction come to life."

"Docker is the obvious choice for any architecture based on microservices. I would even go as far as saying that without containers (Docker or any other type), microservices produce more problems than solutions. You can find more information in the “Microservices: The Essential Practices” article. As a proxy, both NGINX and HAProxy work great. Each has its downsides but overall you can hardly go wrong with either.

Anything but a minuscule cluster needs an orchestrator. I prefer Docker Swarm as it currently provides more freedom than other solutions. On the other hand, it comes with fewer tools packaged inside the distribution. You need to build things by yourself (I'd say that's the cost of freedom). Kubernetes is more mature and comes with more functionality out of the box. Mesos was not initially designed to work with Docker, but gained Docker support as an afterthought. For a more detailed comparison, please read my “Docker Clustering Tools Compared: Kubernetes vs Docker Swarm” article.

Finally, my preferred CI/CD server is Jenkins. Bear in mind that implementing the flow as described in this article is painful and costly to maintain when chaining together freestyle jobs. Instead, the preferable way to go is through the Pipeline and the CloudBees Docker Pipeline plugins. For more information about Jenkins Pipeline, please read my “The Need For Jenkins Pipeline” and “Jenkins Pipeline” articles."

Johan Cruyff comments, “I trained about 3-4 hours a week at AJAX when I was little. But, I played 3-4 hours everyday on the street. So, where do you think I learned to play football?”

1. Start small, then extend. Whether creating a new system, or adding a feature to an existing system, I always start by making a very simple version with almost none of the required functionality. Then I extend the solution step by step, until it does what it is supposed to. I have never been able to plan everything out in detail from the beginning. Instead, I learn as I go along, and this newly discovered information gets used in the solution. I like this quote from John Gall: “A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked.” 2. Change one thing at a time. When you develop, and some tests fail, or a feature stops working, it’s much easier to find the problem if you only changed one thing. In other words, use short iterations. Do one thing, make sure it works, repeat. This applies down to the level of commits. If you have to refactor the code before you add a new feature, commit the refactoring first, then (in a new commit) add the new feature. 3. Add logging and error handling early. When developing a new system, one of the first things I do is adding logging and error handling, because both are useful from the very beginning. For all systems that are bigger than a handful of lines of code, you need some way of knowing what happens in the program. Perhaps not when it is working as expected, but as soon as it doesn’t, you must be able to see what’s happening. The same goes for error handling – errors and exceptions happen in the beginning too, so the sooner you handle them in a systematic way, the better.

"I'll take a child who is deeply curious and intrinsically motivated to pursue the joy of finding things out rather than one who is supremely obedient, and deeply motivated by pressure and extrinsic rewards. Unfortunately schools—even some elementary schools—are designed for the most part to nurture the latter."

Great little piece on Arsenal's youth development.

Awesome.

1. Allow yourself the uncomfortable luxury of changing your mind.
2. Do nothing for prestige or status or money or approval alone.
3. Be generous with your time, resources, giving credit and especially with your words
4. Build pockets of stillness into your life - and get enough sleep
5. When people try to tell you who you are don't believe them
6. Presence is far more intricate and rewarding an art than productivity
7. "Expect anything worthwhile to take a long time" - Debbie Millman

https://www.brainpickings.org/2013/10/23/7-lessons-from-7-years/

Very interesting project.

A great list of the NBA's endpoints.

"But as they perform in Carnegie Hall and become chess champions, something unexpected happens: Practice makes perfect, but it doesn’t make new."

"A majority of the tennis stars remembered one thing about their first coaches: They made tennis enjoyable."

"what motivates people to practice a skill for thousands of hours? The most reliable answer is passion — discovered through natural curiosity or nurtured through early enjoyable experiences with an activity or many activities."

"If you want your children to bring original ideas into the world, you need to let them pursue their passions, not yours."

On Feynman… “He was not only a top-notch physicist, but he was an artist, a Renaissance type of person. He had certain insights and perceptions in physics that I have no word to describe other than ‘artistic.'”

“I’m smart enough to know that I’m dumb.”

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.” “It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.”

“I never pay attention to anything by ‘experts’. I calculate everything myself.”

“There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it’s only a hundred billion. It’s less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers.”

“Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty — some most unsure, some nearly sure, but none absolutely certain.” “We absolutely must leave room for doubt or there is no progress and no learning. People search for certainty. But there is no certainty.” “I have approximate answers and possible beliefs in different degrees of certainty about different things, but I’m not absolutely sure of anything.”

Stephen Hawking puts it this way: “The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.” Stay passionate, but stay humble too. Never stop learning. Be an expert generalist if you can.

"There’s a delightfully meta component here: not only are the lessons hard to learn, but the lesson that the lessons are hard to learn is hard to learn."

Condition averse, message centric, abstraction seeking.

Composition not inheritance.

"It is almost seen as the extra edge in a manager, one of the pillars necessary to make one truly complete. If the fundamental requirement is first to get results, the second is to do so by playing good football, and the third is to do so by developing players and displaying real coaching. It suggests to the sustainability of a manager and his ideas. Even though Van Gaal has often burned bridges at clubs, after all, some of the players he has first given a chance to -- such as great generations at Ajax, Barcelona and Bayern -- have persisted long after he has left."

“Inside Out” offers a new approach to sadness. Its central insight: Embrace sadness, let it unfold, engage patiently with a preteen’s emotional struggles. Sadness will clarify what has been lost (childhood) and move the family toward what is to be gained: the foundations of new identities, for children and parents alike.

- Methodolgies are best developed by analysing the anomalies not explained by the current model
- Japan did not understand the US mentality before it attacked Pearl Harbour
- Conflict may be avoided by opening variables and preventing binary comparisons between parties

Methodology based on three things: strategy, humans and continuous improvement.

The strategy sets out the big picture, the human part takes into account getting people to implement the strategy (e.g. giving cyclists flavoured pineapple water which is more pleasant to drink than just water to keep them hydrated) and continuous improvement involves always testing your assumptions to ensure your strategy is right and the people are implementing it efficiently.

"Jonathan Legard presents a special programme on the effect of marginal gains in sport with studio guest Sir Dave Brailsford, former performance director of British Cycling and current manager of Team Sky. You'll also hear from Chris Froome, Lewis Hamilton, Roy Hodgson, Dr Steve Peters, Wladimir Klitschko, Kath Grainger and Matthew Syed. The show also examines how the philosophy of marginal gains can be used in other areas of life, including business, education and healthcare."

Resilience not strength…

"When you think about it, most of modern life seeks to minimise uncertainty in life. The Leaving Cert reward system, which places the supposedly most secure professions at the top of the pecking order, creates a series of incentives for teenagers to embrace a structured, pre-ordained life.

That would all be okay if the world wasn’t changing so rapidly. If we were in a nice version of the Soviet Union, seeking this structured life would make sense. But we live now in a period of immense change, where the person who is resilient enough to roll with the punches is the person who wins.

You can only roll with the punches if you are prepared – and if you understand that often you can’t see the punches coming.

This means a lifestyle and a career that embraces new things, does new things and never seeks the stultifying refuge of status. It means taking risks and embracing risk."

“At this level, it is a constant battle of getting something extra,” said Cech. “Because after all those years, sometimes you hear, ‘oh I have a top player, what do you want me to teach him?’ But you can learn every day until you are 80.”

“If you’re a professional goalkeeper for 20 years and somebody keeps shooting the ball at you, after a while, just catching it from 15 yards will not make you progress,” said Cech. “You don’t go any further than just catching the ball from that distance. So you have to find a way of making that exercise more complicated so you know your brain will switch on and go further than this.

“This is the way he works. We try to catch different shape balls, bigger balls or smaller ones because then you need to adapt your hand-eye coordination every time. Suddenly your brain starts working again. You can use colours. Imagine you saving the ball but at the same time a card is held up. You save the ball and shout the colour — you are concentrating on more things. That makes your peripheral vision better as well. Your brain is working much more than just with a simple catch.

“He is always searching for new things to bring it further, to be more efficient and try to make things happen for a goalkeeper to progress even at the highest level. I keep using a table tennis robot which shoots ping-pong balls out. You have to catch it with one hand so it gives you a completely different hand-eye coordination. Then, when you have both hands facing one football, everything becomes easier.

"It is easier to stay out of this trap if you start by designing classes based on their responsibilities, you can then progress naturally to specifying commands that the class may execute, as opposed to queries that inform you as to the state of the object."

"The single most important thing a boss can do, Scott has learned, is focus on guidance: giving it, receiving it, and encouraging it. Guidance, which is fundamentally just praise and criticism, is usually called “feedback,” but feedback is screechy and makes us want to put our hands over our ears. Guidance is something most of us long for."

Sandberg pushed forward, asking whether Scott’s ums were the result of nervousness. She even suggested that Google could hire a speaking coach to help. Still, Scott brushed off the concern; it didn’t seem like an important issue. “Finally, Sheryl said, ‘You know, Kim, I can tell I'm not really getting through to you. I'm going to have to be clearer here. When you say um every third word, it makes you sound stupid.’”

“Now, that got my attention!” Scott says.

For all of us raised in a culture that preaches, “If you can’t say something nice…", that criticism might not sound so nice. But Scott knows now that it was the kindest thing Sandberg could have done for her. “If she hadn't said it just that way, I would've kept blowing her off. I wouldn't have addressed the problem. And what a silly thing to let trip you up.” (Incidentally, she did work with that speaking coach, and kicked her um habit handily.) In the years since, Scott has worked to operationalize what it was that made Sandberg such a great boss."

Useful roundup of the current state of UIPresentationController.

"There’s a reason for this regression to the mush that doesn’t have to do with the megalomaniac plans of product managers (“hey, if we add a chat client, we could eat AOL’s lunch”). Unix has pipes, which make it easy to build complex applications from chains of simpler commands. On the Web, nobody may know you’re a dog, but we don’t have pipes, either. There’s no good way to connect one Web application to another. Therefore, everything tends to be monolithic; and in a world of monolithic apps, everyone wants to build their own garden, inevitably with all the features that are in all the other gardens."

Wonderful piece on Arsenal v Bayern in the UEFA Youth League.

"So the first thing to know is that you don’t suck, your environment does. You just need to learn to set up a better habit environment."

(Unsurprisingly) smart approach by Intercom.

"Mindset is how you see the world around you and how you see yourself within that world. World-view and self-image are determined by your subconscious beliefs which can be either limiting or empowering. A limiting belief is one that keeps you from obtaining your goals or your dreams. The key to cultivating a successful mindset is to identify and change your limiting beliefs."

"The Technology Radar is a document that sets out the changes we think are interesting in software development."

Awesome idea, expertly implemented.

Excellent post on Intercom's process

Challenging & inspiring. Apply wisdom to your life.

Just used this to "fix" a TTF font height. Seems to work great! Thanks Andy ;)

Also includes checklists

DIGITAL SERVICE PLAYS

Understand what people need
Address the whole experience, from start to finish
Make it simple and intuitive
Build the service using agile and iterative practices
Structure budgets and contracts to support delivery
Assign one leader and hold that person accountable
Bring in experienced teams
Choose a modern technology stack
Deploy in a flexible hosting environment
Automate testing and deployments
Manage security and privacy through reusable processes
Use data to drive decisions
Default to open

"Reduce the timeframe between building software and it being used by paying customers, and the speed at which you can grow your business will increase exponentially. This is what Marc Andreessen calls cycle time compression."

"He mentioned that they use Git, but not GitHub—depending on somebody else’s service isn’t secure enough, private enough, or even reliable enough. After all, you can run your own Git server pretty easily. But I think that’s missing the whole point of GitHub. GitHub’s central feature isn’t Git. It’s comments on commits and pull requests. It’s feedback. It’s critique. It’s discussion."

"That’s what proposing a budget based on worth helps you with. It focuses the mind on what assumptions we can challenge or even ignore. If we only have 5 weeks to do something, it’s just not going to work to go through the swamp to get there. We have to find a well-paved road."

Proper NSNotification stuff

Excellent introduction into CAAnimation.

"Being close to a problem provides not only insight for how to solve it, but the motivation to actually follow through."

"Life is development."

As a solution to this problem, I propose a simple set of rules and requirements that dictate how version numbers are assigned and incremented. These rules are based on but not necessarily limited to pre-existing widespread common practices in use in both closed and open-source software. For this system to work, you first need to declare a public API. This may consist of documentation or be enforced by the code itself. Regardless, it is important that this API be clear and precise. Once you identify your public API, you communicate changes to it with specific increments to your version number. Consider a version format of X.Y.Z (Major.Minor.Patch). Bug fixes not affecting the API increment the patch version, backwards compatible API additions/changes increment the minor version, and backwards incompatible API changes increment the major version.

BBC: tablets are 20% of video requests; their Android team needs to be 3x the size of the iOS team to deliver the same experience

There are a few simple things new parents could be told: speak to your child a lot. Read to it, sing to it, sit on the floor when you play with it, feed it healthy stuff. Don’t smack it, because violence shapes the young child’s brain. Not all parents know these things, which is why some British kids start school unable to say “cat”. This advice could be delivered through health services, which typically deal with new mothers anyway.