DPL Reading List – August 26, 2016
Here are some of the articles we’ve been reading around this office this week.
The 40 Best Places To Learn Something New Every Day – “Today, the worlds of learning and personal or professional development are literally at your fingertips. The open learning movement has made the opportunity to get smarter in your spare time completely accessible to anyone with an internet connection, and it’s exploded in recent years.”
Reconsider (Thanks to Cassey Lottman for recommending this article) – “Well, the reason I’m here is to remind you that maybe, just maybe, you too have a nagging, gagging sense that the current atmosphere of disrupt-o-mania isn’t the only air a startup can breathe. That perhaps this zeal for disruption is not only crowding out other motives for doing a startup, but also can be downright poisonous for everyone here and the rest of the world.”
15 Lessons Learned While Converting From ASP.NET To .NET Core (Thanks to Matt Babcock for recommending this article) – “At Stackify we have been doing a lot of work with .NET Core over the last few months. We ported StackifyLib and our logging appenders over. We have also made sure that our app performance tools, Prefix and Retrace, can be used to profile .NET Core based apps. In fact, we’ve even converted the entire codebase of Prefix to core so it can run on a Mac! Below are some of the things we have learned along the way that we thought would be useful to share.”
A Good Idea Isn’t Enough. 3 Lessons From Building Skype And TransferWise (Thanks to Jarrod Wubbels for recommending this article) – “I’ve been lucky enough to see firsthand two ideas make it from the back of a napkin to global businesses — first at Skype and now at TransferWise. Looking back, the ideas behind both companies seem like common sense: letting the whole world speak for free and making international transfers as easy as sending emails. But in fact both were a completely new way of looking at things. A way that the incumbents in the sectors either couldn’t or wouldn’t consider.”
Is All Our Hard Work Killing Our Future? – “My thought is this: I am worried that the amount of energy that we are throwing at working, and all the creativity that we are throwing at our jobs, we may be losing out on the benefits of leisure. Leisure — time with no expectations attached and no inherent goals — allows for play and free-thinking. It allows for learning for learning’s sake, and for the exploration of curiosities.”
The Best Platforms Are More Than Matchmakers (Thanks to Brian Zimmer for recommending this article) – “True platform innovators aren’t just market matchmakers using data-driven algorithms to drive better buyer-seller matches; they invest in new value creation. In platform markets, cultivating user capability becomes as strategically important as reducing transaction costs. Successful platforms empower their users. Where traditional business models sell products and/or services, matchmaking models sell reduced transaction costs. The platform investment model, however, creates multi-sided surplus — more value to sell.”
If A Programmer Is A Soldier And The Languages Were Weapons, What Would Each Language Be As A Weapon? (Thanks to Hari Wiguna for recommending this) – We thought this was a fun Question and Answer.
