DPL Reading List – December 4, 2015
Here are some of the articles we’ve been reading around this office this week.
Learning to Code: Not A Guarantee – “So while a bootcamp or training program can make promises or guarantees. Those are hinging on your ability to deliver and put the work in. For the amount of work you are about to undertake, is it what you want? It can be a rewarding and amazing career, but it isn’t a guarantee.”
Personas Are Dead. Long Live The Heroes! (Thanks to Jarrod Wubbels for recommending this article) – “Positioning the user as the hero in a human-centered design process provides a natural way to evoke empathy from the design team and from project stakeholders. Using some loose narrative structure and story elements, we are able to communicate insights, decisions and implications with a language that all humans understand: Story.”
The Future Is The Internet Of Things—Deal With It – “Today, millions of devices expose what they see, hear, and otherwise sense to the Internet. And thanks to cheap embedded systems, they don’t need an old VME or Windows box to do it. Billions of other devices that defy the usual definition of “computer” are communicating over networks, almost entirely with other machines. These “Internet of Things” (IoT) devices send telemetry to and receive instructions from software both nearby and on far-flung servers. Software and sensors are controlling more of what once was done by humans, often more efficiently, conveniently, and cheaply.”
Monuments To Failure (Thanks to Andrew Tarr for recommending this article) – “There’s about $70 billion worth of project deaths commemorated here, just a small subset of all the dearly departed projects we have covered in the Risk Factor blog. We haven’t even tried to compute the costs involving those projects which may be, like Frankenstein’s monster, technically alive, but would be better off dead for the all the negative value they create.”
1,000 Sign-Ups Before Launching A Product (Thanks to Brian Zimmer for recommending this article) – “With my first failed attempt of a building company, I totally neglected the fact that goal of a startup is to make something that people want. How come you are sure things are on the right track, without talking to the people. Doesn’t matter what kind of business you are starting, B2C or B2B the validation of the problem and value proposition should be the first step.”
Why Performance Matters, Part 2: Perception Management (Thanks to Jarrod Wubbels for recommending this article) – “Time can be analyzed from two different points: objective and psychological. When we talk about time that can be measured with a stopwatch, we’re talking about objective time, or clock time. Objective time, though, is usually different from how users perceive time while waiting for or interacting with a website or app.”
Why Silicon Valley Needs To Start Internships For High Schoolers – “K-12 classroom technology education hasn’t kept up with the demand for qualified engineers, programmers and designers. Code.org, a consortium of big tech firms including Google, Facebook and Microsoft, last month made its case for reform when it wrote a letter to various Senate and House committees calling for computer science to be added to the list of ‘core academic subjects.’ But if we wait for government action, the problem may merely persist. It’s up for us in the tech community to help schools begin building the engineering pipeline we all need.”
