DPL Reading List – April 14, 2017
Here are some of the articles we’ve been reading around this office this week.
Housing Go – Behind the Screens (Thanks to Jarrod Wubbels for recommending this article) – “Redesign of our mobile website provided us the opportunity to revamp the code base to push performance to the max. With the technological advancement and improved capabilities of modern browsers like Service Workers, IndexedDB, Add to Home Screen, Push Notifications, our aim was to make an app that is fast, performant and reliable.”
8 Ways to Read (a Lot) More Books This Year – “For most of my adult life I read maybe five books a year — if I was lucky. I’d read a couple on vacation and I’d always have a few slow burners hanging around the bedside table for months. And then last year I surprised myself by reading 50 books. This year I’m on pace for 100. I’ve never felt more creatively alive in all areas of my life. I feel more interesting, I feel like a better father, and my writing output has dramatically increased. Amplifying my reading rate has been the domino that’s tipped over a slew of others.”
How to Design Meetings Your Team Will Want to Attend – “High-quality conversations with broad participation allow people to get to know each other in ways that lead to friendship and collaboration. It’s the act of being with other people in an attentive, caring way that helps us feel that we are all in this together. Crafting a quality experience in your meetings takes time, but it’s worth it.”
Use this exercise to solve any Product Design Challenge – “Creative problem solving is the core of design — so give it the respect it deserves and cut out the wasteful, demoralising, fatigue-inducing discussion.”
Spend 30 minutes every day being creative for nobody but you – “Spend 30 minutes a day to be creative, with no agenda and no goal and no statistics to worry about. Those 30 minutes are going to become the best part of your day. Whether it’s design, writing, coding for the sake of coding — it doesn’t matter. Those 30 minutes will be vital to the growth of your own creativity.”
The Three-Hour Brand Sprint – “This post is a D.I.Y. guide. You can do these exercises with your own team, without any special expertise. At the end, you’ll have a set of diagrams — a simple brand cheat-sheet — that you can use to make decisions. It’s not a replacement for a good branding agency, but it’s a heckuva lot better than nothing. And if you do hire an agency, the cheat-sheet will make you a better, smarter client.”
I camped out with a tech billionaire. The advice he gave me was priceless – “Imagine a world in which people embrace change, strive to create new markets, never stop learning, and are constantly investing in future skills. This is the kind of world I want to live in.”
