DPL Reading List – March 3, 2017
Here are some of the articles we’ve been reading around this office this week.
Penny Pinching in the Cloud: Running and Managing LOTS of Web Apps on a single Azure App Service – “Remember that you can fit as many web applications as memory and CPU will into an Azure App Service Plan. An “App Service Plan” in Azure is effectively the Virtual Machine under your Web Apps. You don’t need to think about it as it’s totally managed and hidden – but – if you choose think about it you’ll be able to squeeze more out of it and you’ll pay less.”
Weak Words Kill Experiences (Thanks to Jarrod Wubbels for recommending this article) – “It’s crazy how subtle changes to the language in a product or experience will entirely change the way users feel and react. In fact, understanding the connotations behind certain words (including when they should be used and when they shouldn’t) will make your job and ideas easier to implement.”
A Different Approach to Teaching Kids and Teens to Code – “I ended up “writing” a computer program, where the “computer” was the entire classroom with the students being my 1s and 0s. My hope was to have them evaluate Conditions (“If this then do that otherwise do something else”) while understanding the Assumptions I had made, and then importantly — predict Exceptions (when an assumption would fail,) and how we could fix them.”
Announcing the first SHA1 collision – “A collision occurs when two distinct pieces of data—a document, a binary, or a website’s certificate—hash to the same digest as shown above. In practice, collisions should never occur for secure hash functions. However if the hash algorithm has some flaws, as SHA-1 does, a well-funded attacker can craft a collision. The attacker could then use this collision to deceive systems that rely on hashes into accepting a malicious file in place of its benign counterpart.”
How To Ask for the Truth – “When things go wrong on a team I manage, one of the first things I always ask myself is “what questions could I have asked to find this out earlier?” and then I start asking those questions more regularly. You will never get to a point where you are always asking the right questions at the right time, but half the battle is simply knowing that that is perhaps the most important part of your job.”
The story of a designer conquering mathematics – “If you consider learning something you hated, you’d better to make sure the knowledge is practical enough to apply to your work. The answer is yes! In my case (I’m working on designing mobile apps), I was surprised there are many apps using geometry in their UI design! Also, you can easily share your knowledge with developers, because most (all?) programming languages in my field support mathematical expression.”
If Your Morning Routine Isn’t Working, This Will Help You Fix It (Thanks to Brian Zimmer for recommending this article) – “According to research, when you create and follow a morning routine, your stress, and anxiety levels will start to plummet and your life satisfaction levels will begin to soar.”
