Mobile 2.0

In 2004, ten years after Netscape launched, Tim O’Reilly launched the ‘Web 2.0’ conference, proposing (or branding) a generational shift in how the web worked. There were lots of trends, and none of them really started in 2004, but to me, looking back, the key thing was that people said ‘if we forget about dial-up and forget about supporting old and buggy web browsers, and presume that lots of people are online and have got used to this stuff now, what can we build now that we couldn’t build before?’

Case study: How complexity creeps in – Signal v. Noise

Seemingly inconsequential decisions can open the door to significant organizational and operational complexity

Lately we’ve been on a bit of a tear internally working to eliminate operational complexity from our business.

Complexity is like addiction… It comes on slowly, forming weak bonds that you can barely feel. But as it continues, the bonds strengthen quietly until they calcify and become hard to break.

Why do programmers need long periods of silence in order to do their job?

Written 38w ago · Upvoted by

Ido Moshe

, Full stack web development for over 18 years

Well let me see if i can come up with an example that would be understandable to a non programmer.

Hopefully, you all know how to do long division (if you don’t, then look it up). So lets say you have this long division problem in front of you:

My dad predicted Trump in 1985 – it’s not Orwell, he warned, it’s Brave New World

We were keeping our eye on 1984. But it’s Brave New World we should have feared instead.

Photograph: Flickr/Urban Integration

Over the last year, as the presidential campaign grew increasingly bizarre and Donald Trump took us places we had never been before, I saw a spike in media references to Amusing Ourselves to Death , a book written by my late father, Neil Postman, which anticipated back in 1985 so much about what has become of our current public discourse.

The Bad Product Fallacy: Don’t confuse “I don’t like it” with “That’s a bad product and it’ll fail”

Benedict Evans at a16z recently tweeted the following:

There’s so much truth in this tweet. And it resonates so much, I think it deserves a name:

The Bad Product Fallacy

Your personal use cases and opinion are a shitty predictor of a product’s future success.

I’ve been in the Bay Area for 10 years now , and nothing stings more than whiffing on the prediction of whether a product will be success. Getting this wrong can hurt the ego and sometimes the checkbook too – just ask the dozens of investors who’ve passed on Facebook, Google, Uber, and so on! Personally, I missed completely on Facebook’s potential , and that’s just one of many bad predictions over the years.

Time-less. Is technology shaping a 6th sense or have we opened the door to the 4th dimension?

Do you ever feel like your entire life is on a schedule

Can you sense people in a hurry or feel them standing behind you in lines at the store?

How often can you sense someone in a hurry from just an emoji or the lack of a response in a text message?

The Future of Food With David Friedberg – NewCo Shift

NewCo Speaker Spotlight

David Friedberg is a serial entrepreneur and investor in Silicon Valley, having started a number of notable companies including The Climate Corporation , a climate-prediction startup, Eatsa , an automated quinoa-based fast food chain with no cashiers, and Metromile , a pay-per-mile auto insurance company.

An ex-Googler with a degree in astrophysics, Friedberg was involved in launching products like AdWords and Gmail. In 2006, he quit Google to co-found The Climate Corporation, which builds weather prediction tools for farmers. He sold the company to Monsanto for $1.1 billion in 2013.

Team of Teams & Complexity: An Approach for breaking down Silos

Once upon a time we categorized companies into two broad categories with regards to decision making: Centralized & De-centralized. This model is easy to comprehend when we think of a central headquarters housing centralized functions and executives, and then a large number of branches which service local regions. A bank or retail operation is a common example. Thinking on the subject seems non-applicable to companies that lack this distributed branch structure.

Thoughts on Bots – Cody Simms – Medium

What should we expect from a bot ecosystem?

Image via Giphy: http://giphy.com/gifs/someone-robot-typing-RPZu7v6zA2WOI

Thoughts on bots.
Hot hot hot.
Bots have thoughts on lots and lots.
No dots. Just bots.
Hot / not? Great Scott!

If you talk like Dr Seuss to a bot, can it learn to respond in rhyme? We shall see. Yippee!

The internet is abuzz this week on the bot ecosystem that Facebook is seeking to create around Messenger, and of course Slack has been investing here for some time as well. Personally I found the bot announcements at Facebook’s F8 way less profound than Zuckerberg’s approach to a 10-year roadmap , his images of airplanes that can fly at 60K feet for months at a time and beam internet around the world, and his vision that in an AR-enabled future everything that projects an image today (such as a television) will be just a $1 app in an AR app store . (If you have not watched his F8 keynote , take the 30 minutes to do so. I’m convinced that he’s the living embodiment of Steve Jobs, as no one else comes close to having his scale of impact on culture from a technology-led perspective.)

The Science of the One-Inch Punch

Physiology and neuroscience combine to explain Bruce Lee’s master move.

Getty Images

Forget all those broken boards and crumbled concrete slabs. No feat of martial arts is more impressive than Bruce Lee’s famous strike, the one-inch punch . From a single inch away, Lee was able to muster an explosive blow that could knock opponents clean off the ground. Lee mastered it, fans worldwide adored it, and Kill Bill “borrowed” it . But if you’re like us, you want to know how it works.

The most important thing Dropbox did to scale Product Management

The most important thing Dropbox did to scale Product Management

These opinions are entirely my own, distilled from my experience at Dropbox in 2012–2015 as well as working with other startups. Since it’s been a few years, I’m sure Dropbox and their process look quite a bit different now.

I spent a lot of time in 2016 doing mentoring, advising, and consulting. Many conversations revolved around building product management teams, and through those conversations, I’ve got to reflect on the lessons I’ve learned from past PM roles. Some of those lessons are common sense and shared across most tech companies I’ve talked with. Others aren’t as obvious.

Work at different management levels | Lara Hogan

I remember working as a developer at a company and complaining that I had no idea what the bosses did all day. It felt like while we engineers were working hard and shipping stuff, managers just talked to a lot of people all the time, or sat in their offices behind closed doors, and I had no idea what their work looked like.

How We Structure Our Days as a Remote Team for Optimal Collaboration, Productivity and Creativity

How do you work best throughout the day?

For some of us on the Buffer team, it’s about the right morning routine to set the day right. For others, the right evening routine is what it takes to get ahead for the next day.

We’ve found there’s no one way to organize your work day — and that the best fit looks different for every person.

Adam Gopnik on Darwin’s Brilliant Strategy for Preempting Criticism and the True Mark of Genius

“People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come into the mind of others,” the great seventeenth-century French physicist, philosopher, and inventor Blaise Pascal wrote as he contemplated the art of changing minds . Two centuries later, Charles Darwin (February 12, 1809–April 19, 1882) provided supreme practical proof of Pascal’s insight as he forever changed the way we think about the origin of life on Earth. And he did so with immense rhetorical ingenuity, instructive in the intricate art of crippling potential criticism of one’s ideas by taking charge of all conceivable counterarguments.

Why You Should Stop Caring What Other People Think (Taming the Mammoth) – Wait But Why

We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing. Buy it here. (Or see a preview .)

Part 1: Meet Your Mammoth

The first day I was in second grade, I came to school and noticed that there was a new, very pretty girl in the class—someone who hadn’t been there the previous two years. Her name was Alana and within an hour, she was everything to me.

Zeromalist – Zero is more | Jonathan Verrecchia

Zeromalist – Zero is more

This manifesto documents my minimalism and simple living guidelines.

Embracing minimalism on different aspects of your life has plenty of benefits, like peace of mind, knowing where things are, and being low-maintenance in general. By pushing for minimalism all the way to actually reaching zero, you unlock features. These can be significant (like letting you rent your apartment on Airbnb) or minor (like not having to check-in any luggage at the airport).

How to use 1 on 1 meetings to drive performance & prevent turnover

“I need to give my notice. I’ve found another job.”

Susan’s greatest fear had become a reality. Allen, one of her best people, was leaving.

With an overwhelming sinking feeling, she thought to herself, “What do I do now?”

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

There’s no easy answers when you lose a good person. The best thing you can do is prevent it from ever happening.

3 Things I Learned Working for a Micromanager – NewCo Shift

Get Shift Done: Management

First off, I hate using the term micromanager***,*** it is so negative. Before deciding to write this post, I read a few articles just to make sure my experience matched the general consensus regarding micromanagement. I certainly do not want to throw this term out without consideration of what it represents. My conclusion is still that unfortunately I did find myself working for a micromanager, and just like the term, it was a negative experience. Given all of that, here are few lessons I was able to gleam from the whole thing…

J.M. Fortier and the Rise of the High-Profit Micro Farm – Modern Farmer

It’s a warmer-than-average December day in Selmer, Tennessee. A diverse group of farmers, from teen-aged to late fifties, are all waiting around patiently, mingling and sipping coffee. Everyone has a name tag with his or her home state on it, and the range is wide: Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Georgia, Kentucky.

Ray Tyler, owner of Selmer’s Rosecreek Farms and coordinator of the event later says that as many as eighty farmers from more than a dozen states attended this sold-out demo—came there, an hour from anything, to hear Jean-Martin Fortier talk about what he calls “six-figure farming.”

The Art of the Awkward 1:1

The Art of the Awkward 1:1

You probably do a lot of one-on-one meetings at work: with your manager, teammates, folks from other teams. Unfortunately, most people totally waste their 1:1 time. The problem: the 1:1s aren’t awkward enough*. Here’s how to make them better.*

The 1:1 is a sacred space. It’s intimate. It’s dedicated to just you and the other person. It’s super high bandwidth for complex and uncertain content, especially emotions, hopes, and fears. It’s also the most inefficient way you can devise to disseminate non-controversial info.

About predictability and clearly defining team goals

It’s an Engineering Manager responsibility to guarantee the team health measured in terms of qualities such as performance, commitment, accountability and predictability (among lot of others). However this can’t be forced by the Manager. It’s actually the team effort and its proper channelling the decisive factors for achieving these goals. Because these are goals, aren’t these?

Well, that’s an interesting first discussion. What is the real value of having these qualities accomplished? Can the company sell “predictability” to its customers? Is predictability a new application feature?

The Sanctity of Your Calendar – The Year of the Looking Glass

Photo by Leticia Chamorro

The Sanctity of Your Calendar

I am currently on parental leave, so these days I wake up to the freedom of an empty calendar that’s ready to be filled with toddler train rides, visits to the pumpkin patch, and round after round of couch-snuggling. As this stretch of time at home with my family is so very limited, I am determined to cherish, to the very best of my abilities, the simple pleasure of every little moment.

On Digital Minimalism – Study Hacks – Cal Newport

On Digital Minimalism

December 18th, 2016 · 47 comments

The Curmudgeonly Optimist

People are sometimes confused about my personal relationship with digital communication technologies.

On the one hand, I’m a computer scientist who studies and improves these tools. As you might therefore expect, I’m incredibly optimistic about the role of computing and networks in our future.

On the other hand, as a writer I’m often pointing out my dissatisfaction with certain developments of the Internet Era. I’m critical, for example, of our culture’s increasingly Orwellian allegiance to social media and am indifferent to my smartphone.

I’m Jason Fried, CEO of Basecamp, and This Is How I Work

Basecamp is a web-based project management tool, and like so many other software tools and startups before it, the creators of Basecamp made it for themselves. They just needed a decent way to manage projects and collaborations. It just happens that other people want to use it to.

The company now known as Basecamp was founded 17 years ago by Jason Fried, Carlos Segura, and Ernest Kim. Originally called 37signals and involved with various types of web design and development—including products like Campfire as well as what became Ruby on Rails —they eventually shifted their focus to their namesake product, Basecamp.

Object-Oriented UX

Issue № 431

Illustration by

Sue Lockwood

Object-Oriented UX

In June 2012, while working at CNN.com , I was tasked with designing the user experience of election night. The next five months of my life would be dedicated to that single night—but success to me had nothing to do with who won. I was concerned with findability, data visualization, a shape-shifting canvas, and how the hell mouse-over flyouts were going to work on an iPhone. For the first time in history, CNN.com was releasing a responsive experience. And, for the first time in history, I was going to design a responsive experience.

Speed as a Habit – First Round Review

This article is by Dave Girouard , CEO of personal finance startup Upstart , and former President of Google Enterprise Apps. He’s well known for building Google’s enterprise apps division into a $1B+ global business. Here he shares his tips for making speed fundamental to your company.

I’ve long believed that speed is the ultimate weapon in business. All else being equal, the fastest company in any market will win. Speed is a defining characteristic — if not the defining characteristic — of the leader in virtually every industry you look at.

Value Based Pricing 101: The Necessities and Your Pricing Strategy

Please note: This post is the third post in a five part series on the main pricing methodologies, highlighting the pros and cons of each. Check out the first post on cost plus pricing and second post on competitor based pricing .

We’re beginning every one of these posts with the same statement: “Pricing is the most important aspect of your business.” No other lever has a higher impact on improving profits. We elaborated on this assertion in a previous pricing strategy post, but realize that a 1% improvement in price optimization results in an average boost of 11.1% in profits. That’s no small change.

How to simplify complex decisions by cleaving the facts

We all face complex business decisions for which there is no one, correct answer, and yet a strong and occasionally permanent decision is required of us.

Sometimes the puzzle is created by fundamental uncertainty inherent in the decision. Examples: how a market will evolve, what competitors are investing in, whether new marketing campaigns will be successful, or how an important new hire will perform.

Crisp’s Blog » Making sense of MVP (Minimum Viable Product) – and why I prefer Earliest Testable/Usable/Lovable

A couple of years ago I drew this picture and started using it in various presentations about agile and lean development:

Since then the drawing has gone viral! Shows up all over the place, in articles and presentations, even in a book (Jeff Patton’s “User Story Mapping ” – an excellent read by the way). Many tell me the drawing really captures the essence of iterative & incremental development, lean startup, MVP (minimum viable product), and what not. However, some misinterpret it, which is quite natural when you take a picture out of it’s original context. Some criticize it for oversimplifying things, which is true. The picture is a metaphor. It is not about actual car development, it is about product development in general, using a car as a metaphor.