DPL Reading List – July 6, 2018
Here are some of the articles we found this week.
The Myth of the Intrapreneur – “Hiring a few talented individuals and hoping for the best, without changing anything about your organization, won’t cut it. Companies need a strategic plan for professionalizing and institutionalizing innovation across their organizations. This is the only way to nurture the breakthrough innovations needed for the future health of the business.”
Are you respecting users’ time? A calm technology checklist – “In 2015, I published a book on calm technology. Since then, I’m often asked if a specific product or product design is calm, created to seamlessly, unobtrusively integrate with the user’s life. My core principles were inspired by a landmark 1995 essay by Xerox PARC researchers Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown, whose ideas are needed more than ever. What’s become clear to me is we also need a way to express these concepts in practical terms that designers can actually reference in their daily work–in other words, a calm technology checklist.”
Watch IBM’s TV ad touting its first portable PC, a 50-lb marvel – “The 5100 had a 5″ screen—which might be smaller than the one on your smartphone—and loaded programs off jumbo-size tape cartridges. When the ad says that the computer weighs about 50 pounds, that’s supposed to be impressively light; after all, IBM was known at the time for room-filling mainframes. “You can plug it in anywhere” is also a boast, since it wasn’t yet a given that you could simply power a computer off garden-variety power.”
Time to Innovate – “It makes sense that the people spending most of their day working on products or with customers are bombarded with insights on new and better ways to serve those customers. But in too many companies, employees are not empowered to do anything with their ideas. Instead, decisions on what ideas to explore are made by senior leaders. But these senior leaders don’t have the same proximity to insights because they spend most of their working day meeting with other senior leaders. We call this the Insight-Decision Divide.”
Anatomy of a perfect pull request – “Writing clean code is just one of many factors you should care about when creating a pull request. Large pull requests cause a big overhead during the code review and can facilitate bugs in the codebase. That’s why you need to care about the pull request itself. It should be short, have a clear title and description, and do only one thing.”
How to recharge on vacation when you can’t stop stressing out – “Unfortunately, life doesn’t always work out that way. You might have every intention of going on a work-free beach getaway, and despite your best pre-vacation prep, a stressful bombshell drops on your last week in the office. Maybe you lost an important client unexpectedly, or you’re told that the company might be restructuring and there are possible layoffs in the works. How do you enjoy your well-deserved time off without going into a tailspin and coming back even more stressed than when you left?”
Fiat Chrysler Is Being Sued Over a Software Flaw – “As software use in vehicles increases, further hard-to-replicate software-induced problems will occur, many potentially creating a crash risk. It may be time for the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration to revisit its recall process, which was developed with hardware defects in mind to take into account the unique automotive safety challenges that software errors pose.”
