I participated in a two-day Lab Days last week in LA for our colleagues in Animation Studio. The event was like hack days, but different in three aspects: first, we weren’t expected to work days and nights. Second, we didn’t come up with the ideas but were assigned to the projects which had eager stakeholders. Third, we were expected to present a usable product at the demo. (The organizers intentionally named it Lab Days, not Hack days to convey the different expectations)
The second and third differences put a lot of pressure on me. I couldn’t just call it a day because I knew how painful the problem was to the stakeholders. At the same time, the result has to be solid. After our demo, where my stakeholder jumped up and down, I was fried. I didn’t work longer than regular hours, but I was so intensely focused. I don’t believe I can do this every day, but it was fun to understand a problem, ideate a solution together, and create a working prototype in two days.
People 
Performing a Project Premortem
This Twitter thread about preventable problems prompted me to read more about premortems. I can now see that people are incentivized to chase after highly-visible projects since it is hard to prove that one is an unsung hero. Premortems look like an excellent way to detect and reward people who discover preventable problems and prevent them.
Software Engineering
Introducing Yarn 2! 🧶
Yarn, one of the two most popular package managers, has received a major update. As the article describes, a lot has changed, including backward-incompatible features such as Plug’n’play and protocols. I am afraid these won’t work with the existing libraries on npm.
Playwright: Node library to automate Chromium, Firefox and WebKit with a single API
Microsoft announced an exciting evolution of Puppeteer named Playwright. Its APIs are more suitable for testing thanks to setTimeout-free automation, which is a crucial improvement.
Mirage JS: A client-side server to develop, test and prototype your JavaScript app
As UI developers, we are usually at the end of the dependency chain. We always wait for our requirements, designs, and APIs. So I welcome any tool that can remove that dependency. Mirage JS seems to be able to unblock us from backend dependencies and enable more iterations and experiments.
Business
Building a more private web: A path towards making third party cookies obsolete
Cookies have been integral to track users’ activities across different websites and, thus, enabling advertisements to be more targeted. Google’s Chrome team announced Privacy Sandbox last August to make the technology less invasive. This first step will stop cookies from being sent everywhere.
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