DPL Reading List – April 17, 2015

Here are some of the articles we’ve been reading around this office this week.

A Rare Interview With Graphic Design Legend Massimo Vignelli – “From 2006, the late designer shares the story behind his infamous New York subway map and why typographic elegance will prevail.”

iPhone Killer: The Secret History of the Apple Watch – “There were no working prototypes; there was no software. There were just experiments—the iPod crew had made something with a click wheel—and lots of ideas. The expectations, however, were clear: Apple’s senior vice president of design, Jony Ive, had tasked them with creating a revolutionary device that could be worn on the wrist.”

Microsoft Corporation Gains a Key Ally in the Internet of Things – “The IoT market represents the final frontier of the One Windows strategy. By offering Windows 10 as a free upgrade for most non-enterprise users on phones, tablets, and PCs, Microsoft plans to unite all consumer-facing devices under a single OS. Microsoft will then extend that reach into IoT devices, which can be accessed by the same “universal apps” which can run across multiple Windows devices.”

What I’d Tell Myself About Startups If I Could Go Back 5 Years (Thanks to Nate Lowry for recommending this article) – “This is, in no particular order, what I’d tell myself about startups if I could go back in time to when I first got involved. Which is probably the same as what I’ve learned.”

What It Really Takes to Be a Professional Programmer (Thanks to Nick Sherrill for recommending this article) – “There’s a lot more to professional programming than writing code. From working with a team to solve problems to version control, you won’t make it to the major leagues without a toolkit of other critical skills. We asked you, and some other professional developers, what those skills are, and here’s what we learned.”

Little Things – “While it’s correct to worry about the big issues, you must resist the urge to act on them directly. Before acting, you should first translate the big thing into a related set of little things.”

Open Source Windows is “Definitely Possible”, but Don’t Hold Your Breath – “Technical complexities aside, we struggle to see Microsoft releasing Windows as open source any time soon. Even as its influence wanes in the face of mobile-oriented competitors, Windows remains a huge cash cow for Redmond—one that it’s unlikely to want to give up. But that doesn’t mean that the company has no further open source ambitions. We could well believe that a piecemeal opening of certain parts of the Windows platform will occur over the next few years.”

Consumer SSDs Benchmarked to Death—and Last Far Longer Than Rated – “Tech-savvy buyers who might be worried about SSD lifetime decreasing even as SSD capacity skyrockets should have their fears assuaged by the ridiculous number of writes the tested drives endured; the drive that survived the longest survived more than 2.4 petabytes worth of sustained writes. That’s probably about 240x as much writing as a typical consumer SSD would need to endure over its lifetime.”