Category: Uncategorized

In an article in today’s Washington Post, the following is reported:

Inside several of Amazon’s cavernous warehouses, hundreds of employees spend hours a day playing video games. Some compete by racing virtual dragons or sports cars around a track, while others collaborate to build castles piece by piece.

But they aren’t whiling the time away playing Fortnite and Minecraft. Rather, they’re racing to fill customer orders, their progress reflected in a video game format that is part of an experiment by the e-commerce giant to help reduce the tedium of its physically demanding jobs. And if it helps improve the efficiency of work like plucking items from or stowing products on shelves for 10 hours a day or more, all the better.

The video games are optional for the thousands of “pickers” and “stowers” across a handful of the company’s warehouses. (Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

Developed by Amazon, the games are displayed on small screens at employees’ workstations. As robots wheel giant shelves up to each workstation, lights or screens indicate which item the worker needs to pluck to put into a bin. The games simultaneously register the completion of the task, which is tracked by scanning devices, and can pit individuals, teams or entire floors against one another to be fastest, simply by picking or stowing real Lego sets, cellphone cases or dish soap. Game-playing employees are rewarded with points, virtual badges and other goodies throughout a shift.

Think Tetris, but with real boxes.

Of all the responses to this story, this tweet is my favorite:

Black Mirror Season 5 is lit https://t.co/SgPcqrtbl9

— Blake News (@blakehounshell) May 21, 2019

Photo by Susie Lu. Click to see at full size.

Susie Lu is a Senior Data Visualization Engineer at Netflix, and one of her many side projects is all about bringing data visualizations to places that need them, but don’t have them yet. She’s tackling the humble supermarket receipt — pretty much unchanged over decades — which is a challenge given the terrible resolution of their printers. She’s done a fine job working within those constraints!

Photo by Susie Lu.

From the Fast Company article about her project:

So she acquired a low-resolution thermal printer, the kind used at most stores, and started the process of coding and designing something better. What she created–using a grocery receipt of her own as reference–was a better receipt, with three distinct elements. On top, it features a bubble chart where spending is itemized by category. In her case, “meat & seafood” is a big bubble, representing about a third of her spending, and “snacks” is a tiny bubble, representing only 10%.

Below that, there’s a standard itemized list for reference, too. But each individual item features a bar chart of its own, representing how expensive it was in relation to other items in the category. A $13 ribeye steak fills the bar full, while a $4 chicken jalapeno sausage only makes a small dent. In aggregate, this design lets you skim to see where your dollars went categorically, and by item.

For more, read the whole article and check out her tweet below:

Early prototypes of reviziting the receipt, one piece of a larger question I want explore: how can viz be integrated into everyday experiences? pic.twitter.com/hswtVFp0oc

— Susie Lu (@DataToViz) May 4, 2019

It’s 2019, and if you’re writing code in JavaScript/ECMAScript, you should be doing it in ES6 (a.k.a. ES2015) at the very least.

After all, ES6 was released back in June 2015 — long enough ago that back then, I was still explaining to some friends and family what “Uber” was. Since then, we’ve had ES7 (a.k.a. ES2016), ES8 (a.k.a. ES2017), and ES9 (a.k.a. ES2019), with each iteration adding new features to increase the power and expressiveness of the language. If you’re not availing yourself of these new versions and their features, you might be limiting or even hindering yourself. If you write code in JavaScript, you should at least be aware of modern JavaScript/ECMAScript features and how to use them!

Tampa Bay JavaScript/ECMAScript developers have an opportunity to get up to speed this Wednesday, May 8 at 6:00 p.m. at Suncoast Developers Guild in St. Pete. The Women Who Code Tampa meetup are holding their meetup then, and the topic will be Modern Features for Javascript: Foundations of ECMAScript (ES6+).

Here’s their description of the meetup:

Build upon your pre-existing knowledge of JavaScript by adding modern features to your projects. In this talk, we’ll cover arrow functions, template literals, spread operators, and plenty of other things you’ve seen floating around in others’ repos. It is recommended for you to have a basic understanding of JavaScript for this talk, but all are welcome to come learn!

Local designer-turned-front end developer Taylor Cox will be presenting. I had the privilege of meeting Taylor through the Hospitality Hackathon that Sourcetoad held in 2017; hers was the team that won the event.

If you want to level up your JavaScript/ECMAScript skills and you can get to St. Pete, don’t miss this!

• What: Modern Features for Javascript: Foundations of ECMAScript (ES6+)
• When: Wednesday, May 8, 6:00 – 8:00 p.m.
• Where: Suncoast Developers Guild (2220 Central Avenue, St. Petersburg)