The Coming Software Apocalypse

There were six hours during the night of April 10, 2014, when the entire population of Washington State had no 911 service. People who called for help got a busy signal. One Seattle woman dialed 911 at least 37 times while a stranger was trying to break into her house. When he finally crawled into her living room through a window, she picked up a kitchen knife. The man fled.

The Airport Bomber From Last Week You Never Heard About

What the smartest people do on the weekend is what everyone else will do during the week in ten years

Many breakthrough technologies were hatched by hobbyists in garages and dorm rooms. Prominent examples include the PC, the web, blogs, and most open source software.

The fact that flip-flop wearing hobbyists spawn large industries is commonly viewed as an amusing eccentricity of the technology industry. But there is a reason why hobbies are so important.

Operational Ruthlessness, the key to fast growth startups

Share27 Share99 Shares 128

Since 2010, I’ve been religiously blogging about the ToutApp journey, but about 24 months ago I had to go on a blogging hiatus except for one small post about personal growth.

Over the past two years, ToutApp has grown from 7 people in size to 60+ people, delivered strong quarter over quarter growth, raised $3.3m and then $15m of venture capital from the best venture capital firm in the valley, and have built a crack team of badasses across our executive and management team.

An Introduction to Interaction Flows – UX Planet

Could IX Flows be a key to smoother design/dev handoffs?

Illustration by Havana Nguyen

As UX Designers, we put care and critical thought in our projects. Every interaction is planted with a specific purpose for the user. This is why it makes it that much more painful for us when the final developed interface does not align with our original vision.

Three Paths in the Tech Industry: Founder, Executive, or Employee

When people ask me for tech career advice I find it helpful to lay out the three paths I’ve encountered most in my career: founder, executive, and employee. I’m leaving out investor because the best path to being an investor that I’ve seen starts with being successful (or failing) at one of these three first.

Below I’ll outline what I see as the pros/cons and useful strategies for each role.

On 1:1s

Credit: Flickr / Ivan

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that 1:1s are one of the most important activities of being a manager. And yet we all know of managers who don’t do them, or do them so badly that they can hardly be called 1:1s at all. I’ve heard about managers who show up to the 1:1 and talk at their report until the time is over. I’m not sure if this is better or worse than no 1:1 at all. The worst manager I ever had, I dreaded our 1:1s so much that I used to get up an hour later on days when I would have to speak to him. My recollection of them was that there would be a terrible, awkward silence, which I would feel compelled to fill, but anything I said would be judged and used against me.

Are You Ready To Consider That Capitalism Is The Real Problem?

This story reflects the views of this author, but not necessarily the editorial position of Fast Company.

In February, college sophomore Trevor Hill stood up during a televised town hall meeting in New York and posed a simple question to Nancy Pelosi, the leader of the Democrats in the House of Representatives. He cited a study by Harvard University showing that 51% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 no longer support the system of capitalism, and asked whether the Democrats could embrace this fast-changing reality and stake out a clearer contrast to right-wing economics.

From Coding To Management To Leadership

This post was first published on CoderHood as From Coding to Management to Leadership. CoderHood is a blog dedicated to the human dimension of software engineering.

Management is not for everyone.

The skills required to code and the skills needed to manage people are very different. Being a good manager is also not the same as being a good leader. Moreover, being a good manager of developers requires being able to think like a developer.

Metrics-Driven Development

Metrics-Driven Development is an emerging term developing from the

practices of continuous integration, continuous delivery, dev ops, and

agile software methodologies. This article serves to define what

metrics-driven development is, why it is useful, and how to use it to

drive software changes.Let’s start with a definition of [metrics-driven

development](http://blog.librato.com/posts/2014/7/16/metrics-driven-development). Metrics-Driven Development (MDD) The use of real-time metrics to drive rapid, precise,

and granular software iterations.

This definition is simple and straightforward, but does leave room for

Three Powerful Conversations Managers Must Have To Develop Their People

The fog of war envelops every battlefield. When the plan breaks down amid the chaos and ambiguity, how do young Marines know what to do next? How can they take relevant action in the present when their carefully detailed plan has been rendered useless? Every leader communicates something called Commander’s Intent — effectively an end state or envisioned future of the battlefield when all is said and done. Understanding this vision, even the most green Marines can take decisive, relevant action right now. Managers should equip their people to achieve the same level of clarity in their careers, says Candor, Inc. co-founder and COO and former military leader Russ Laraway.

When Will the Planet Be Too Hot For Humans? Much, Much Sooner Than You Imagine.

To read an annotated version of this article, complete with interviews with scientists and links to further reading, click here.

I. ‘Doomsday’

Peering beyond scientific reticence.

It is, I promise, worse than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today. And yet the swelling seas — and the cities they will drown — have so dominated the picture of global warming, and so overwhelmed our capacity for climate panic, that they have occluded our perception of other threats, many much closer at hand. Rising oceans are bad, in fact very bad; but fleeing the coastline will not be enough.

Stables and Volatiles

Stephen was a hired gun at my first start-up. His contract started a year before I arrived, but he was long gone before I walked in the door. The story goes that when Stephen started, he found a small, solid team of five engineers, a QA lead, and a project manager. They were slowly and steadily going… nowhere. After two weeks of watching the team’s slug-like pace, Stephen was fed up.

If You Never Have Enough Time, Notice Where Time Leaks…Then Declutter Your Routine

Photo by Kelly Jean on Unsplash

In the current smartphone age, you are highly accessible and distractible.

It’s an unquestioned truth of modern life: we are starved for time. Time pressures are multiplying at a dizzying rate.

Time is a non-renewable resource, wherever you are, whatever the time of day. Try your best to plan it out and make the most of it.

The one thing CEOs should delay as long as possible

Most CEOs are an urgent breed.

Every CEO I know laments how they need to instill a stronger sense of urgency in their company around every single thing, to get things done faster.

However, there is one very important thing they should have zero urgency around.

In fact, they should try to delay it as much as possible; ideally, forever.

10+ Startup Tech Leaders Reveal How They Prioritise Software Development

It turned out that one of the biggest challenges startup tech leaders are facing is prioritising software development.

In fact, 25% of the respondents said this is their biggest challenge, according to the State of Software Development report.

If it’s a challenge you’re facing then this post is for you.

But how do other tech leaders actually try to overcome this?

We decided to ask more than 10 tech leaders (mostly CTOs) about the practices they use to prioritise software development. The goal of this post isn’t to select one best way but rather to show different approaches you can select from or gain inspiration from as you come up with your own method.

Bungie’s 13-year battle with crunch culture

Matthew Handrahan

Editor-in-Chief

Friday 4th August 2017

Share this article

Recommend

Companies in this article

Bungie

Destiny 2 will mark the end of Bungie’s struggle to eliminate enforced crunch, according to head of engineering Luke Timmins, a process that started with the “brutal” experience of finishing and shipping Halo 2.

Speaking at Casual Connect USA this week, Timmins traced the evolution of Bungie’s approach to “people management” in his 16 years at the company, which he joined as a tester five months prior to the launch of Halo.

Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?

One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. “We go to the mall,” she said. “Do your parents drop you off?,” I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I’d enjoy a few parent-free hours shopping with my friends. “No—I go with my family,” she replied. “We’ll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we’re going. I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes.”

10,000 Hours With Claude Shannon: How A Genius Thinks, Works, and Lives

We got up-close-and-personal with a genius for five years. Here are 12 things we learned.

Credit: Nokia Bell Labs

By Rob Goodman and Jimmy Soni, co-authors, A MIND AT PLAY

For the last five years, we lived with one of the most brilliant people on the planet.

Sort of.

See, we just published the biography of Dr. Claude Shannon. He’s the most important genius you’ve never heard of, a man whose intellect was on par with Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton.

The Top 10 Reasons Why You Should Become a Manager

TL;DR: If you are unsure whether you should pursue a career in management, ask yourself certain questions: Do you truly care about your co-workers? Can you enjoy working with people? Can you listen? Can you spot talent? Do you feel fully comfortable in your technical field? Only if you can answer a majority of these questions with “yes” should you switch to management.

Hearts and Minds: Shaping dev culture through technical training

Culture is a set of norms, implicit rules and values that a group of people live by. It entails what is right or wrong, acceptable or unacceptable in people’s behavior. Culture is a living, breathing thing, constantly changing and evolving. Wix Engineering is proud of its dev-centric culture. It puts us at an advantage in recruiting and retaining top developers.

As our company grows, we have to make sure we don’t lose our culture. Left unattended, it will turn into ‘null culture’. It’s what happens when no formal culture is put into place. It leaves people guessing what is socially acceptable and creates an impossible environment for those who guess wrong. It’s not the type of environment that makes employees want to stick around.

The Biology of Productivity: How to Stay Motivated

Superb time-management skills are worthless when you’re feeling unmotivated, distracted or tired at work. Until robots take over our day-to-day workloads, our productivity is directly linked to our mental and physical well-being.

via GIPHY

The expectation at work to remain competent, motivated and attentive for the entire workday puts a huge strain on our biological resources. Thankfully modern science has given us a better understanding of how our bodies work, which can help us leverage our physiology to work smarter.

Why You Need to Do Burpees

What is the best predictor of when you’ll die? That seems like a hard—not to mention morbid—question, but, incredibly, study after study is showing that simple tests of physical performance are highly predictive of future mortality.

My favorite recent example is a study from Brazil that tracked just over 2,000 subjects age 50 and up. A 10 point score system was developed to assess how easily they could get up off the floor based on a sitting-rising test (SRT):

Inside Uber’s new approach to employee performance reviews

Uber SVP and Chief Human Resources Officer Liane Hornsey vividly remembers the day Susan Fowler published her blog post alleging workplace harassment and management issues came out.

It was Sunday, Feb. 19, 2017 — her dad’s birthday. And the company was also “literally thrown into shock,” she told me at Uber’s headquarters in San Francisco last week.

“I’ve literally never seen employees so shocked by something and so put off by something,” Hornsey said. “And I then decided, because I could see this hurt, I could see the shock, that what the company needed more than anything, honestly, was to be listened to.”

Design your personal growth

Illustration by Fanny Luor

Over the years, I’ve been so lucky to work on teams that support my growth. Most notably, I’ve learned so much from Percolate, Dropbox, and leadership coaches.

I’ve tried lots of growth frameworks and found the best ones promote self discovery and focus.

In recent conversation, I discovered many of my friends are trying to grow, but struggling to make progress. I dug deeper and realized, growth frameworks are not widely known or practiced.

Better Business Through Sci-Fi

Why are C.E.O.s and military leaders paying novelists to imagine the future for them?

Illustration by Mark Pernice

About five years ago, Ari Popper enrolled in a course on science-fiction

writing at the University of California, Los Angeles, hoping to distract

himself from the boredom of his day job as the president of a

market-research company. “It was, like, the best ten weeks of my life,”

We Evolved to Run—But We’re Doing It All Wrong

View Images

China hopes to be world competitive in track and field soon. Races during the National Games competition.

By Simon Worrall

PUBLISHED

These days, running seems to have little to do with survival—it’s all about sport watches and burning calories.

But for our remote ancestors, the ability to run over long distances in pursuit of prey, such as ostrich or antelope, gave us an evolutionary edge—as well as an Achilles tendon ideal for going the distance. (Related: “Humans Were Born to Run, Fossil Study Suggests.”)

How to Run a Quarterly Product Strategy Meeting: A Board Meeting for Product

One of the greatest challenges for the Head of Product at a fast-growing startup is to maintain focus on product strategy, to enable good, fast consumer and data-driven decisions, and to pass on learnings across the organization as it grows. It’s easy when the company is a dozen people, but how do you scale the fast decision-making of startups when the company grows beyond fifty or a hundred people?

What To Do If Your Product Isn’t Growing – Initialized Capital – Medium

How ‘Critical User Journeys’ can help a product take off

As a founder, product lead at Pinterest and PM for a couple products at Google, as well as a growth partner for Initialized Capital, I’ve seen many product teams struggle to grow.

Many products start out with a bang. Some find product-market fit with sustained growth. A few have gone through spurts of hyper-growth. But more often than not, I’ve seen most of them linger then fizzle.

Being Busy Permanently Reduces Your Capacity to Think Deeply and Creatively

The other day a friend mentioned that he’s looking forward to autonomous cars, as it will help lower the accident and fatality rates caused by distracted driving. True, was my initial reply, with a caveat: what we gain on the roads we lose in general attention. Having yet another place to be distracted does not add to our mental and social health.

Why Organizations Don’t Learn

Idea in Brief

The Problem

Even companies dedicated to continuous improvement struggle to stay on the path. Research suggests that’s because of deeply ingrained biases: We focus too much on success, take action too quickly, try too hard to fit in, and depend too much on outside experts.

The Impediments

These biases manifest themselves in 10 conditions that impede learning. These include fear of failure, insufficient reflection, believing that we need to conform, and inadequate frontline involvement in addressing problems.

If You Want to Be Creative, Don’t Be Data Driven – Microsoft Design – Medium

3 Ideas that will completely change how you think about data

There is no inherent value in any piece of data because all information is meaningless in itself. Why? Because information doesn’t tell you what to do.
 — Beau Lotto

As I write this I’m sitting in a small conference room on the second floor of an office building. The view from the windows is a paved courtyard down below roughly 25 feet from the building with some tables, chairs, and well-manicured landscaping. I can see that the sun is shining, and it looks like a lovely day. Based on that data, should I go work outdoors? Consider your answer, and we’ll come back to the question later.

Why we choose profit – Signal v. Noise

We’re outspoken about running a profitable company in an industry that so often eschews profits for potential. So why? People ask us why all the time. Why choose profit?

So I thought I’d detail some of the reasons why we designed Basecamp, our company, to be profitable as quickly and consistently as possible. And 17 years into it, we’ve been profitable for 17 years straight. Being profitable is a feature of our company (companies are products too).

The Real Roots of Midlife Crisis

This summer, a friend called in a state of unhappy perplexity. At age 47, after years of struggling to find security in academia, he had received tenure. Instead of feeling satisfied, however, he felt trapped. He fantasized about escape. His reaction had taken him by surprise. It made no sense. Was there something wrong with him? I gave him the best answer I know. I told him about the U-curve.