DPL Reading List – May 22, 2015

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

Get People to Listen to You When You’re Not Seen as an Expert (Thanks to Brian Zimmer for suggesting this article) – “If you’re not yet considered an expert, it’s harder to get your ideas noticed — but not impossible. With these strategies, you can begin to overcome others’ resistance and make sure your voice is heard.”

All Hail the Next Big Job, the Chief IoT Officer – “The idea of creating a Chief IoT officer is beginning to get attention, but it’s unclear whether anyone today holds that title exclusively. More likely, IoT is getting attached to the list of CTO and CIO requirements. But the pressure for a better development model is there.”

Ten Things I Learned Studying Ten of the World’s Fastest Growing Startups – “We wanted to answer the question that everyone on the outside of these rocketships wanted to know the answer to: “How did they grow so fast?” So we set to work doing deep research dives on companies like Uber, Snapchat, Yelp, LinkedIn, HubSpot, and Evernote. By scouring the Web for interviews, videos, past profiles, and more, we pulled insight from dozens of sources for each case study. Based on our research we were able to piece together what made these companies so successful—and in the process reverse engineer their growth engine.”

Here’s One Thing All the Billion-Dollar Unicorns Have in Common – “What’s going on here? How can so many startups achieve the coveted billion-dollar valuation status so readily when investors are supposed to be, by nature, conservative and inherently suspicious of risk? And, of course, is this kind of investing nuts? A survey out Friday from the Silicon Valley law firm Fenwick and West gives us a pretty good clue. The firm advises a lot of these companies on its funding arrangements with investors — which are generally kept secret — and so it has a solid view into the makings of a unicorn. Fenwick analyzed 37 investments in privately held companies valued at $1 billion or more during the 12 months ended March 31.”

Behind Frenemy Lines (Thanks to Jarrod Wubbels for recommending this article) – “My job title tends to include the word “developer”, but my main concern has always been design. In some dev shops, this has made me a double-agent. I would get to hear the developers gripe about how the designers had unrealistic expectations, and then I’d cross the office to hear the designers kvetch about how the developers didn’t understand the project. And look?—?neither of them were wrong, exactly.”

Under the Hood: Facebook’s Cold Storage System – “Two billion photos are shared daily on Facebook services. Many of these photos are important memories for the people on Facebook and it’s our challenge to ensure we can preserve those memories as long as people want us to in a way that’s as sustainable and efficient as possible. As the number of photos continued to grow each month, we saw an opportunity to achieve significant efficiencies in how we store and serve this content and decided to run with it.”

Solid-state Drives Lose Data if Left Without Power for Just a Few Days – “New research suggests that newer solid-state hard drives, which are faster and offer better performance, are vulnerable to an inherent flaw — they lose data when they’re left dormant in storage for periods of time where the temperature isn’t properly regulated.”