DPL Reading List – October 30, 2015
Here are some of the articles we’ve been reading around this office this week.
The One Thing Every Programmer Should Do To Succeed In The Tech Industry, According To An Ex-Microsoft Engineer (Thanks to Curtis Johnson for recommending this article) – “’I would advise folks in software to do one thing, and that’s write,’ he told Business Insider. ‘Learn how to write … It’s actually useful. You need to know how to express yourself. And it’s really tough for a lot of engineers to step up and do public speaking.’”
Her Code Got Humans On The Moon—And Invented Software Itself – “Hamilton, a 24-year-old with an undergrad degree in mathematics, had gotten a job as a programmer at MIT, and the plan was for her to support her husband through his three-year stint at Harvard Law. After that, it would be her turn—she wanted a graduate degree in math. But the Apollo space program came along. And Hamilton stayed in the lab to lead an epic feat of engineering that would help change the future of what was humanly—and digitally—possible.”
The Ownership Problem (Thanks to Jarrod Wubbels for recommending this article) – “Hanging onto ownership, at the end of the day, hurts your ability to ship amazing work. It turns out that the way great products get built isn’t by owners or groups of owners. Great work is done by people who accept that everyone on their team co-owns the product, the design, the code. People on highly successful teams understand and embrace the inherent fuzziness of their roles and responsibilities. They share knowledge and decision-making, which winds up elevating the products they work on.”
You Thought Google Fiber Was Fast? This City’s Internet Just Got 10 Times Faster – “Residents can now sign up for a 10 gigabit-per-second plan, allowing them to download an HD movie in less than a second. The plan certainly isn’t cheap, at $300 a month. You might wonder why anyone would even want such a service. But as more of our everyday objects become smart appliances, our bandwidth consumption is set to exceed expectations. And this new service from Chattanooga offers more evidence that a national race to 10 Gbps is on.”
Reimagining Codecademy.com (Thanks to Jarrod Wubbels for recommending this article) – “We have recently launched a considerable redesign of Codecademy.com, which you can read about in detail in our blog. Now, we would like to take this opportunity to expand on the main design principles that helped us guide through this 3-month undertaking.”
Netflix Shuts Down Its Last Data Center, But It Still Runs A Big IT Operation – “Netflix has been shifting technology from in-house data centers to third-party facilities for years now, and it says that the process is coming to its logical conclusion—the company is shutting down the last of its data centers.”
Super Mario Maker Crushed My Dreams Of Making Video Games – “I’d dreamed about making Nintendo games since I was 6 years old, but when the company gave me the chance to prove a game design genius lived under my skin, I flopped. It was then that a shocking and heartbreaking realization washed over me: I hate making video games.”
