DPL Reading List – May 27, 2016
Here are some of the articles we’ve been reading around this office this week.
7 Ways To Stop A Meeting From Dragging On (Thanks to Brian Zimmer for recommending this article) – “If human beings can act so passively when health and safety are on the line, it should be no wonder that we turn ourselves into victims when the sole risk is an hour or two of wasted time. Meetings are so notoriously ineffective because most participants act like passive victims rather than responsible actors.”
The Problems With Forcing Regular Password Expiry (Thanks to Jarrod Wubbels for recommending this article) – “CESG now recommend organisations do not force regular password expiry. We believe this reduces the vulnerabilities associated with regularly expiring passwords (described above) while doing little to increase the risk of long-term password exploitation. Attackers can often work out the new password, if they have the old one. And users, forced to change another password, will often choose a ‘weaker’ one that they won’t forget.”
Elevate Yourself With Side Projects – “For many, the first barrier to starting a new side project will be finding the time. If you’re in this camp, finding stretches of tinkering time in your already-busy life will be a challenge. Start by identifying one thing you currently spend your time on that could be replaced by another without causing ripples of disruption across the rest of your life.”
How To Practice Mindfulness Throughout Your Work Day (Thanks to Brian Zimmer for recommending this article) – “Mindfulness is not about living life in slow motion. It’s about enhancing focus and awareness both in work and in life. It’s about stripping away distractions and staying on track with individual, as well as organizational, goals. Take control of your own mindfulness: test these tips for 14 days and see what they do for you.”
Caching Best Practices & Max-age Gotchas (Thanks to Jarrod Wubbels for recommending this article) – “Used correctly, caching is a massive performance enhancement and bandwidth saver. Favour immutable content for any URL that can easily change, otherwise play it safe with server revalidation. Only mix max-age and mutable content if you’re feeling brave, and you’re sure your content has no dependencies or dependents that could get out of sync.”
How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds - From A Magician And Google’s Design Ethicist – “We need our smartphones, notifications screens and web browsers to be exoskeletons for our minds and interpersonal relationships that put our values, not our impulses, first. People’s time is valuable. And we should protect it with the same rigor as privacy and other digital rights.”
Please Do Learn To Code (Thanks to Brian Zimmer for recommending this article) – “And just like how not everyone who learns to write will go on to become a professional writer — nor everyone who learns arithmetic will go on to become a professional mathematician — not everyone who learns to code will go on to become a software developer. But all people who learn these things will be immensely better off as a result of their efforts.”
