don't panic labs reading list

DPL Reading List – August 3, 2018

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| August 3, 2018 | in

Here are some of the articles we found this week.

The Biggest Obstacles to Innovation in Large Companies – “In a survey fielded earlier this year for Innovation Leader, an online resource for corporate innovation teams of which I am editor, we asked about the most common obstacles to innovation in large companies. (To be constructive, we also asked about the things that foster innovation.) The responses, from 270 corporate leaders in strategy, innovation, and research and development roles, were illuminating.”

Writing CSS with Accessibility in Mind – “While this wide range of properties and endless ways of solving tasks with CSS makes our lives easier, it also creates the potential to worsen the experience for our users. It’s actually possible to make a website inaccessible in just three lines of CSS. In this post I’ve collected techniques, considerations and approaches that will help you write more accessible CSS.”

The future of security? A good old-fashioned key – “Over 85,000 employees at the company are now using hardware security keys, including one it developed internally called the Titan Key. And yes, one version of the Titan Key is designed to look like a real key.”

How Software Ate the Point of Sale – “The act of paying for stuff is undergoing a great transformation. The networks of machines and code that let you move your imaginary money from your bank account to a merchant are changing—the gadget that takes your card, the computer that tracks a restaurant or store’s inventory, the cards themselves (or their dematerialized abstractions inside your phone). But all this newness must remain compatible with systems that were designed 50 years ago, at the dawn of the credit-card age.”

How Steve Jobs and Bill Gates defined a decade of tech—according to CNN’s The 2000s – “Though most people reading this website can likely remember the 2000s as if it were yesterday, retrospectives and nostalgia have started to come in. And even if it feels a bit too soon-ish for such treatment, it’s hard to argue with the need to acknowledge the time period’s relevance and impact. The previous decade unequivocally changed the way we operate in a technological sense: the rise of smartphones, the start of companies like Facebook, Google, and YouTube, the ability to get whatever you want whenever you want it.”

Science-backed methods to keep in mind when you’re learning new things – “As a curious person, I constantly find myself reading and learning about new things. So I picked up this book A Mind for Numbers by Barbara Oakley to enhance and elevate my learning process. This blog post is my take on the ten most important things I think that learners should implement.”

This design studio wants to give VR its iPhone moment – “Nonobject’s complex geometry calculations ensure that the infrared sensors can always “see” the controllers as they move through space. But despite this focus on ergonomics, the controller is still a piece compelling industrial design with the polish of a mature commercial product, rather than the demo-level design that rules the industry today.”