DPL Reading List – April 24, 2015

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

The Full Stack Employee – “Just as there are full-stack engineers and full-stack startups, the full-stack employee has a powerful combination of skills that make them incredibly valuable. They are adept at navigating the rapidly evolving and shifting technological landscape. They make intuitive decisions amidst information-abundance, where sparse facts mingle loosely with data-drenched opinions.”

Here’s Google’s Secret to Hiring the Best People (Thanks to Nate Lowry for recommending this article) – “Research shows that combinations of assessment techniques are better than any single technique. For example, a test of general cognitive ability when combined with an assessment of conscientiousness is better able to predict who will be successful in a job.”

Here’s What Billion-Dollar Startups Had in Common During Their Early Days – “There is a lot of coverage of the companies that have reached valuations of over a billion dollars. Many of these companies were not always fast growing businesses.”

Are You Using APIs to Gain Competitive Advantage? (Thanks to Brian Zimmer for recommending this article) – “What do Uber (taxi services), Airbnb (lodging services), Facebook (social networking), Alibaba (e-commerce), and PayPal (online payment) have in common? The obvious things include: All of them drive their core operations on internet platforms and have astronomically high valuations without any notable physical assets. Not so apparent, however, is the fact that they excel at using Application Program Interfaces (APIs) to drive competitive advantage.”

Rendering Performance (Thanks to Nate Lowry for recommending this article) – “Users of today’s web expect that the pages they visit will be interactive and smooth and that’s where you need to increasingly focus your time and effort. Pages should not only load quickly, but also run well; scrolling should be stick-to-finger fast, and animations and interactions should be silky smooth.”

Pycon 2015 – Technical Debt – The Monster in Your Closet (Thanks to Nate Lowry for recommending this) – “What is Technical Debt? A series of bad decisions.”

Intel Shrinks Its RealSense Camera to Bring Kinect-Like Awareness to Smartphones – “Intel plans to cut the fat from its Kinect-like RealSense 3D camera so that it can fit the device on a smartphone. The company’s CEO Brian Krzanich showed off Wednesday in Shenzhen, China a 6-inch prototype phone built with the new camera, which is about half the size of the older version. The company plans to start deploying the technology this year.”

Microsoft Announces Pilot Program to Hire People with Autism – “Why are we so passionate about this space? It’s simple, Microsoft is stronger when we expand opportunity and we have a diverse workforce that represents our customers. People with autism bring strengths that we need at Microsoft, each individual is different, some have amazing ability to retain information, think at a level of detail and depth or excel in math or code. It’s a talent pool that we want to continue to bring to Microsoft!”