DPL Reading List – February 3, 2017

Here are some of the articles we’ve been reading around this office this week.

Why Diverse Teams Are Smarter – “In recent years a body of research has revealed another, more nuanced benefit of workplace diversity: nonhomogenous teams are simply smarter. Working with people who are different from you may challenge your brain to overcome its stale ways of thinking and sharpen its performance.”

Align SVG Icons to Text and Say Goodbye to Font Icons (Thanks to Jarrod Wubbels for recommending this article) – “The push for SVG icons over font icons has caught serious momentum in the web community. With an SVG icon system you can better meet accessibility standards, render higher quality visuals, and add/remove/modify icons in the library with ease.”

Teaching coding from the Metal Up or from the Glass Back? – “Everyone is different and everyone learns differently. When teaching folks to code you need to be aware of not only their goals, but also their learning style. Be ware of their classical learning style AND the way they think about computers and technology.”

How I stay up-to-date as a Developer – “Please folks. Again. Don’t get too obsessed with the new. I mean… As new libraries come along, there’s often some productivity you’d be taking advantage of if you migrated everything. But there’s also another thing that makes you quite productive: Your experience!”

22 Life Lessons I Learned From My Mentors That Every Person Should Know – “I’ve been blessed to meet a lot of wonderful people who I’ve learned a lot from. And if you also want to learn from people you look up to, just observe them. Understand how they behave, think, talk, work, conduct business, etc. That’s why I think everyone has mentors. But not everyone actively observes them.”

Designing the Internet of Things – “As IoT continues to enter the mainstream, it needs to elevate beyond the technology, beyond the novelty of simply being connected. The value of IoT products needs to be clearly understood by consumers and seamlessly adapted to their lives.”

Shh! Don’t Tell Them There’s No Magic In Design Thinking – “As design professionals, we shouldn’t let ourselves think there’s any magic in Design Thinking. Our teams, stakeholders, and executives can believe in it, but we shouldn’t. To do so would be to depend on Design Thinking having magic and such magic doesn’t really exist.”