I recently bought one of these air quality monitors and got to take it out for some measurements!

I'll share some findings in this thread.

CCing @CO2Guerrillas here, in case they would like to share.

A very quick intro:

This device measures:

-CO2 concentration
-relative humidity
-atmospheric pressure
-temperature

I spent ~$200 on Amazon. It pairs with your phone and you can watch data come in every minute or so.

https://t.co/aoXjyq8kdu
A lot of covid transmission is airborne. So, having clean air is a must for reducing transmission.

A great way to see how much clean air you are getting is to measure CO2 concentration.

Too high -> you could use more ventilation -> open some windows!
So, I walked around town and took some measurements.

Outdoor CO2 concentration should be about 400 ppm. I haven't calibrated my device yet, so I measured ~470. Close enough.

<800 is good for indoors. Something like 2000 is very bad.

https://t.co/oZAkVnr9ts
For a reference: inside my apartment I quickly get ~1000 ppm if I don't have windows open. Maybe ~1500 if things get bad.

If I crack some windows, even just barely, it gets down to ~600 ppm very quickly, and my heater can keep the apartment ~70 F no problem.
First stop: a small shop in Harvard Square. It is about 60 ft long, 20 ft wide, and usually has ~3 people in there.

CO2: 937 ppm.

Not great, not horrible. Surprisingly (to me), this place had the highest CO2 on my trip. It did have a purifier, which was nice.
Next stop: a very similar store, but it has less business and only ~1 person in there most of the time.

~700 ppm. Still good.
Plant shop around the corner, which was a bit larger in size, maybe 2-3x, but also maybe ~4 people in there on average.

650 ppm. Not bad!

Fun fact: this shop is 103 years old now.
Next stop was interesting: a paper store that was split into two completely separate rooms. Both the same size, and both had ~2 people in there. One had the AC blasting, the other had it off.

Basically the same results in both: 650-700 ppm
Next stop, a 2-floor CVS which is usually pretty busy. Picked a spot near the center of the store:

620 ppm. Still not bad!

The doors open often, and the AC was on.
Next stop was the Harvard bookstore.

560 ppm.

Very nice! Especially since my device reads ~470 outside.

Took this sample in the essential ideology section.
I was skeptical about the low values, so I went to another section (science books now).

520. Still good!

The whole store had their AC up very high. I could see many of the signs shaking due to airflow inside. I assume they were piping in outdoor air.
Overall, I was impressed with most places! I expected worse, but I also didn't go into any of the more dangerous areas, like restaurants (we still have indoor dining in Boston).
A side note: CO2 concentration is just a proxy for air quality. Not perfect, and many other things matter too.

Follow these people instead of me to get some real science:

@kprather88 @jljcolorado @ShellyMBoulder @CO2Guerrillas @jksmith34

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I think about this a lot, both in IT and civil infrastructure. It looks so trivial to “fix” from the outside. In fact, it is incredibly draining to do the entirely crushing work of real policy changes internally. It’s harder than drafting a blank page of how the world should be.


I’m at a sort of career crisis point. In my job before, three people could contain the entire complexity of a nation-wide company’s IT infrastructure in their head.

Once you move above that mark, it becomes exponentially, far and away beyond anything I dreamed, more difficult.

And I look at candidates and know-everything’s who think it’s all so easy. Or, people who think we could burn it down with no losses and start over.

God I wish I lived in that world of triviality. In moments, I find myself regretting leaving that place of self-directed autonomy.

For ten years I knew I could build something and see results that same day. Now I’m adjusting to building something in my mind in one day, and it taking a year to do the due-diligence and edge cases and documentation and familiarization and roll-out.

That’s the hard work. It’s not technical. It’s not becoming a rockstar to peers.
These people look at me and just see another self-important idiot in Security who thinks they understand the system others live. Who thinks “bad” designs were made for no reason.
Who wasn’t there.
A brief analysis and comparison of the CSS for Twitter's PWA vs Twitter's legacy desktop website. The difference is dramatic and I'll touch on some reasons why.

Legacy site *downloads* ~630 KB CSS per theme and writing direction.

6,769 rules
9,252 selectors
16.7k declarations
3,370 unique declarations
44 media queries
36 unique colors
50 unique background colors
46 unique font sizes
39 unique z-indices

https://t.co/qyl4Bt1i5x


PWA *incrementally generates* ~30 KB CSS that handles all themes and writing directions.

735 rules
740 selectors
757 declarations
730 unique declarations
0 media queries
11 unique colors
32 unique background colors
15 unique font sizes
7 unique z-indices

https://t.co/w7oNG5KUkJ


The legacy site's CSS is what happens when hundreds of people directly write CSS over many years. Specificity wars, redundancy, a house of cards that can't be fixed. The result is extremely inefficient and error-prone styling that punishes users and developers.

The PWA's CSS is generated on-demand by a JS framework that manages styles and outputs "atomic CSS". The framework can enforce strict constraints and perform optimisations, which is why the CSS is so much smaller and safer. Style conflicts and unbounded CSS growth are avoided.
The 12 most important pieces of information and concepts I wish I knew about equity, as a software engineer.

A thread.

1. Equity is something Big Tech and high-growth companies award to software engineers at all levels. The more senior you are, the bigger the ratio can be:


2. Vesting, cliffs, refreshers, and sign-on clawbacks.

If you get awarded equity, you'll want to understand vesting and cliffs. A 1-year cliff is pretty common in most places that award equity.

Read more in this blog post I wrote:
https://t.co/WxQ9pQh2mY


3. Stock options / ESOPs.

The most common form of equity compensation at early-stage startups that are high-growth.

And there are *so* many pitfalls you'll want to be aware of. You need to do your research on this: I can't do justice in a tweet.

https://t.co/cudLn3ngqi


4. RSUs (Restricted Stock Units)

A common form of equity compensation for publicly traded companies and Big Tech. One of the easier types of equity to understand: https://t.co/a5xU1H9IHP

5. Double-trigger RSUs. Typically RSUs for pre-IPO companies. I got these at Uber.


6. ESPP: a (typically) amazing employee perk at publicly traded companies. There's always risk, but this plan can typically offer good upsides.

7. Phantom shares. An interesting setup similar to RSUs... but you don't own stocks. Not frequent, but e.g. Adyen goes with this plan.

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