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Gluggaveður – An Icelandic term for when the weather looks pleasant from your window, but is actually really cold that you need a jacket. Gluggaveður literally means “window-weather”. 💡 This week’s advice: The 20-20-20 rule: Every 20 minutes of screenwork, look at a spot 20 feet away for 20 seconds. This
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Eigengrau - When we close our eyes or enter total darkness most people see vague grey field usually composed of changing regions of tiny black and white dots. This dark grey colour is called the Eigengrau, a German word that means intrinsic grey. What we are seeing is visual noise
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Sesuji ga kooru (背筋せすじが凍こおる), is a Japanese term which literally means “spine freezing” and it’s not hard to imagine when you’d want to use this phrase — footsteps that follow you on your way to the server room or the creepy feeling you get when you deploy to production
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“Saudade” is an untranslatable Portuguese term that refers to the melancholic longing or yearning. A recurring theme in Portuguese and Brazilian literature, “saudade” refers to a sense of loneliness and incompleteness. “Saudade” can more casually be used to say that you miss someone or something, even if you’ll see
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Vacilando is a Spanish term for the act of wandering when the experience of travel is more important than reaching a specific destination. John Steinbeck (in Travels With Charley: In Search of America, 1962) wrote: In Spanish there is a word for which I can’t find a counterword in
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Sobremesa - after-lunch conversation around the table. When you stay at the table after lunch in order to savor a final course of stimulating conversation, you are indulging in sobremesa.
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Verschlimmbessern - To make something worse in an honest but failed attempt to improve it
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Kaizen is a Japanese term and method meaning ‘change for the better’ or ‘continuous improvement.’ It’s a method for transforming habits incrementally, one step at a time, in order to continuously improve. It is also one of the base principles of agile. No, We Won’t Have a Video
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The German word waldeinsamkeit consists of two words joined together. Wald means forest, and einsamkeit means loneliness or solitude. It hints at both the feeling of being alone in the woods and also at a peaceful oneness with nature. Thought of the day: The foundation of maturity: Just because it’
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Meriggiare An Italian verb meaning to rest or relax at midday, usually in a shady spot on a sunny day. From ‘meriggio’ meaning ‘midday’. The advice of the week: Management provides strategic guidance and support only. Tell the teams what you need, trust them to figure out how to execute.
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Goya Goya is an Urdu word for the moment when fantasy is so realistic that it temporarily becomes reality It refers to the total suspension of disbelief you get with good, powerful storytelling. This is how vision should be communicated. The advice of the week: Train employees well enough they
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Desenrascanço is a Portuguese word meaning the action to artfully disentangle oneself from a troublesome situation in an improvised, nonstandard manner. MacGyver utilized this skill every time he averted disaster with nothing but a bent paper clip and a chewing gum wrapper. We also do it with our code right