California Wolf Project releases their 2024 report

The California Wolf Project is a relatively new effort operated by the University of California's Berkeley and Davis campuses to do serious study of the state of affairs when it comes to wolves in California.

What?!?? you may say, are there actually wolves in California?

Yes, actually, there are (although I've certainly never seen any). Wolves re-entered California more than a decade ago, after nearly a century of absence from the state, as part of the splintering of a wolf pack that roamed the high desert of Oregon. The wolves in California occupy the parts of the state that are both:

• extremely rural and sparsely populated
• supportive of an ecosystem in which wolves can find both reliable sources of food and minimal human contact.

For now, as illustrated on the project's 2024 annual report, this means mostly the high plateaus of far north-eastern California.

I've followed the recovery of wolf populations in the high country of the far west for most of my lifetime; the California Wolf Project seems like they will be an excellent contributor to our knowledge of how we are co-habiting with these fascinating animals.

The Duolingo employee handbook is surprisingly good

Have you read the Duolingo employee handbook?

It's really remarkably good, and it's also not dry. I think that second point is really important: over my career, I've participated in at least a dozen of these attempts to write down engineering culture in a way that explains what is good and what is toxic. It's really hard to do this without being bland and dull. Bland and dull means "unread", and so I think the first goal of any employee handbook has to be: get the employees to read this thing! The Duolingo Handbook accomplishes that.

I really liked the little interlude about the Super Bowl advertisement.

When debates broke out over the “right amount of butt” to show, we knew we had a winning idea.

On a more serious note, here's a section that I strongly agree with. My current company spends a lot of time trying to reinforce this same idea, and I know how hard it can be to do this properly. Engineering processes typically involve a lot of review, which means a lot of feedback, which means you need to be thinking about this:

The standard here is “hard on the work, easy on the people.” That means giving constructive, clear feedback that sharpens ideas without undermining relationships. (We stick to the “what,” not the “who.”) It also means being open to receiving feedback and not taking it personally. This candid, constructive approach allows us to hold each other to high standards while fostering trust and collaboration.

If you're involved with engineering culture at your company, you would find it time well spent to read the Duolingo handbook.

WikiTok is clever!

https://wikitok.vercel.app/ is extremely simple, but also surprisingly clever and addictive.

All it does (I think) is:

• Call Wikipedia's "special:random" tool to find a random Wikipedia page.
• Fetch that page and summarize it with an image and a short textual summary
• Display that on your screen.
• Wait for you to scroll down and do it again.

Poof! Endless scrolling of random Wikipedia articles.

Olive the Labrador is 8 weeks old ...

... it's been eighteen years since we had a puppy; I've forgotten everything I thought I once knew.

Time to start learning again!