DPL Reading List – May 6, 2016
Here are some of the articles we’ve been reading around this office this week.
RAM And Sympathy (Thanks to Santi Murtagh for recommending this article) – “One annoyance with the new release is the increase in CPU capacity for Standard Edition, with no increase in RAM capacity. You can now have up to 24 cores on your Standard Edition box. Yep, another $16k in licensing! And they’ll all be reading data from disk. Don’t kid yourself about Buffer Pool Extensions saving the day; nothing is going to beat having your data cached in memory.”
How To Bounce Back After A Failed Negotiation (Thanks to Brian Zimmer for recommending this article) – “Sometimes, despite your best efforts, a negotiation doesn’t go your way. Perhaps a customer pushed for a steeper discount than you wanted to give, or a potential client went with a competitor’s approach to a project. In the face of a disappointment — one where you might appear to be the “loser” — how do you save face? How do you make sure your reputation isn’t damaged and the relationship with your counterpart is intact?”
Designing For Mobile Micro-Moments (Thanks to Jarrod Wubbels for recommending this article) – “In a crowded market, how does an app attract new customers, gain loyalty, and deliver value? With great design for a delightful app experience. Here, Google’s UX Research Lead Jenny Gove will take you through 25 principles to build an app that helps users achieve what they’re looking to do.”
Google Has A New Division Called ‘Area 120’ Where Employees Can Build Their Own Startups – “Area 120 seems to be a bid to encourage more of that entrepreneurial spirit to stay within Google, which was also part of the rationale behind the creation of Alphabet, the larger parent company Google is now a part of.”
If You Want To Be More Productive, Research Shows You Need A Break (Thanks to Brian Zimmer for recommending this article) – “Sometimes we get lost in the lists and productivity hacks. The truth is that no matter what you do to improve your productivity—you still have to do the work. So you might as well get those 5-minute breaks to recharge.”
What Fuels Great Design (And Why Most Startups Don’t Do It) (Thanks to Jarrod Wubbels for recommending this article) – “Design is a powerful and often overlooked way to solve problems. But without the right fuel, design is worthless. When designers don’t know which problems to solve, we spin our wheels. We make products prettier when we could be solving customer’s needs and generating real value. So any company that’s serious about design should get equally serious about listening to customers.”
I’ve Been Working At Startups And Small Business… (Thanks to Jarrod Wubbels for recommending this article) – “I’ve been working at start-ups and small businesses since I was 14 years old. My father and his father before him owned and operated their own small businesses. There’s something about the fight for survival for a small team that’s coded in my DNA.”
