I’m a fan of Tony Hsieh’s Downtown Project and try to do something with the community whenever I’m in town. On Thursday I’m going to be on the Downtown Vegas Podcast which will be filmed live at 9 pm at Inspire Theatre. Please come by if you’re in the area!
Luca Sartoni writes The Rules of A/B Testing by Tyler Durden. “1st Rule: You don’t talk about A/B Testing.”
You Can’t Tell This is 3D Rendered
Khoi Vinh writes about How 75% of the real-looking photographs you see in an Ikea catalog are actually 3d-rendered. Hat tip: Hafiz Rahman.
Posts like this are why @wordpressdotcom and @jetpack offer LaTeX / Beautiful Math support. http://t.co/rYUbyq2IpR
— george ?ephanis toots on mastodon (@daljo628) August 26, 2014
Matthew Ingram writes for Gigaom: Journalism is doing just fine, thanks — it’s mass-media business models that are ailing. Hat tip: Ben Thompson.
Tom McFarlin writes Everything Is Bloated, Nothing Is Good.
How The Sun Sees You
This video really makes you want to wear sunblock, something I haven’t been as good about this week. (Sorry Mom!) Hat tip: Sara Rosso.
You can read on the Jetpack blog and the BruteProtect blog about the company, plugin, and service joining Automattic. BTW, BruteProtect has protected this site from 1,663 attacks in the past 28 days.
Introducing plugin icons in the plugin installer, the defaults are cool (and that library would be nice to support for Gravatar) but go ahead and start making icons for your WordPress plugins. It adds a nice punch and panache to the plugin experience.
We have a great Simplenote for Mac client, and a super clean web version, but nothing first-party for Linux. If anyone is experienced with Linux desktop development and would be interested in creating something extremely minimalist like our Mac app please get in touch!
Ten WP bloggers speak out on Ferguson, a really fascinating spectrum of viewpoints from protesters to media to a blog by an anonymous police officer on duty in Ferguson.
Awesome Screenshot URL tracking and niki-bot, some pretty sketchy things going on in the Chrome extension world. Hope Google starts cleaning these up soon. BTW if you want a better screenshot tool my Automattic colleague Davide makes Blipshot which contains no tracking or spyware.
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
That’s from Robert Heinlein’s character Lazarus Long.
Peter Merel coined this version for developers:
A programmer should be able to fix a bug, market an application, maintain a legacy, lead a team, design an architecture, hack a kernel, schedule a project, craft a class, route a network, give a reference, take orders, give orders, use configuration management, prototype, apply patterns, innovate, write documentation, support users, create a cool web-site, email efficiently, resign smoothly. Specialization is for recruiters.
When I read that it definitely reminds me of some of my favorite colleagues, and something I aspire to myself even though I’m very heavily balanced toward the “lead a team” part right now in my life.
Even as technology is becoming more accessible, modern web development grows more complex. Some might look at that is discouraging, I prefer to think that no matter how far along you get you can still have a lifetime of learning ahead of you.
For interesting debate on the above, check out the c2 wiki Specialization for Insects discussion (last edited March, 2012) and also the page that says “If specialization is for insects then I’d very much like to be a humble insect.” (Last edited November, 2005. I love digging around older parts of the internet.)
The Time I Spent On A Commercial Whaling Ship Totally Changed My Perspective On The World — I know the title sounds baity but this is the best writing I’ve read online in a while, almost like it’s from a different time.
Ethan Zuckerman writes for the Atlantic on The Internet’s Original Sin, advertising.
Humans Need Not Apply
SmartThings & Samsung
SmartThings announced (on their WP-powered blog) that they’re joining forces with Samsung to continue working on their mission of becoming an operating system for your home. I’m both an investor and a fan of the company, which I even let take over my home in SF earlier this year for CNN. As a tinkerer most of what I do with SmartThings so far is relatively basic, I feel like it’s still the very early days of the platform and what’s going to come down the line. Samsung makes so much technology (and appliances, and TVs, and…) I can’t wait to see how they open it up and connect. I also wanted to take this opportunity to congratulate other Audrey companies Divide which joined Google and Creative Market which joined Autodesk earlier in 2014. I wasn’t as good about blogging before and didn’t get a chance to publicly congratulate those teams.
- Understand what people need.
- Address the whole experience, from start to finish.
- Make it simple and intuitive.
- Build the service using agile and iterative practices.
- Structure budgets and contracts to support delivery.
- Assign one leader and hold that person accountable.
- Bring in experienced teams.
- Choose a modern technology stack.
- Deploy in a flexible hosting environment.
- Automate testing and deployments.
- Manage security and privacy through reusable processes.
- Use data to drive decisions.
- Default to open.
That sounds like a list anyone creating something online should follow. Would you guess it’s actually from the US government Digital Services Playbook? Great work by Steven VanRoekel and his team, which I had the pleasure of meeting last time I was in DC. Hat tip: Anil Dash.
From Kathy Sierra, here’s “One of the longest deep studies on negative impact of external reinforcers (e.g. rewards) on long-term motivation”: Multiple types of motives don’t multiply the motivation of West Point cadets. Academic, but interesting.
The Great Filter
This is about the Great Filter. (No, not Akismet.) It’s Adam Ford and Robert Hanson on existential risks to humanity, a continuation of the Fermi Paradox discussion I posted about the other day.