DPL Reading List – December 16, 2016
Here are some of the articles we’ve been reading around this office this week.
The future of front-end development is design – “So, should our kids learn to code? I can’t argue against the value of every child having a working knowledge of software development. But there is a difference between coding foundational technology and front-end development — and the divide is growing. The latter is going to become extinct in favor of designers and design tools.”
Building a startup within a startup (Thanks to Jarrod Wubbels for recommending this article) – “I learned that you need to starve your new products. Being hungry makes you scrappy. Being scrappy makes you build better products quicker.”
Leading in a World Without Secrets (Thanks to Brian Zimmer for recommending this article) – “We asked some of our twenty-something students — digital natives who live with many of the technologies that have produced the new reality — what companies should be most afraid of. Their response: “A grain of truth, in a wrapper of misinformation.” The world has awakened to the power of such dangers. Business leaders must be prepared, in thought and practice, to prevent their companies from becoming a victim.”
The fourth industrial revolution: a primer on Artificial Intelligence (AI) – “What if we could transfer the difficulty of making complex predictions — the data optimisation and feature specification — from the programmer to the program? This is the promise of modern artificial intelligence.”
No Seriously, Are You Actually Designing for Your Grandmother? (Thanks to Jarrod Wubbels for recommending this article) – “You’ve likely heard the phrase, “Design for your grandmother”(or mother). While attempting to encourage empathy, it actually reinforces condescension designers tend to have towards users — viewing them as poor, incompetent souls who need the obvious spelled out to them. This can result in designing with pity to outright annoyance, rather than empathy. With that in mind, I encourage you to think about the “grandmother” figure a little deeper. Does she have any physical or cognitive impairments that make certain tasks functionally difficult?”
The Dirty Secret of App-Install Ads Nobody’s Talking About (Thanks to Jarrod Wubbels for recommending this article) – “What the marketplace needs is a solution that marries the best of the web with the best of native apps: elegance, transparency, speed and seamlessness. That’s the cheese, and we’re all still looking for it.”
Think Strategically About Your Career Development (Thanks to Brian Zimmer for recommending this article) – “In a world where the average employee sends and receives 122 emails per day and attends an average of 62 meetings per month, your boss or HR leadership simply doesn’t have the time or bandwidth to properly think through how best to deploy your talents moving forward. Instead, we have to take control of our career planning to ensure we’re putting ourselves in position for long-term growth.”
