Jahr: 2012

Kas Thomas – Going on a Software-Design Feature Fast: “Find out (via built-in analytics) what the least-used feature of your product is. Get rid of it. […] Replace [it] with API methods and helpful tooling (an SDK). Charge no money for the SDK.”

Derek Sivers – Everything is my fault: “I announced decisions, then assumed they were being done, without following-up to ensure. I whimsically delegated to the wrong people, avoiding the mental work of choosing wisely. […] Now you’re the powerful person that made things happen, made a mistake, and can learn from it. Now you’re in…

“PhantomJS is a headless WebKit with JavaScript API. It has fast and native support for various web standards: DOM handling, CSS selector, JSON, Canvas, and SVG. […] PhantomJS is an optimal solution for headless website testing, screen capture, page automation, network monitoring.” (Via Paul Reinheimer.)

Jason Cohen – Creating a Company Culture that Thrills Customers at WP Engine: “You can train someone how DNS works, but you can’t train someone to naturally have empathy for a customer. […] Driving this completely home, looping in the points above, we won’t be successful if we say, “We want revenues to go up,…

Michael Lopp – Stables and Volatiles: “Your Stables are there to remind you about reality and to define process whereby large groups of people can be coordinated to actually get work done. Your Stables bring predictability, repeatability, credibility to your execution, and you need to build a world where they can thrive. Your Volatiles are…

John Allspaw – On Being A Senior Engineer: “In any project, the designers, product managers, operations engineers, developers, and business development folks all have goals and perspectives, and mature engineers realize that those goals and views may be different. They understand this so that they can navigate effectively in the work that they do. Being…

David Allen – Why do people let themselves get overwhelmed at work?: “People tend to both over-commit and to be inefficient. Few people know exactly how much work they actually have, and therefore must take everything on that they think about and that others ask them to do.” (Via Jack Vinson.)

Eric Steven Raymond in The Art of Unix Programming – Attitude Matters Too: “When you see the right thing, do it — this may look like more work in the short term, but it’s the path of least effort in the long run. If you don’t know what the right thing is, do the minimum…

Gerry McGovern at CMS Wire – Empathy: The Web Professional’s Greatest Skill: “One very interesting technique Tomer uses to combat ‘stay in the building’ syndrome he calls Field Fridays. “Field Fridays are an excellent opportunity for software engineers to meet users face to face, see how they use their products, and learn about their behavior.…

MediaGoblin – How to respond to a YouTube cat-astrophe? Decentralize the web!: “Today, for a few minutes, YouTube went down. For a brief moment in time, millions of cat voices cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. […] But there is a structural problem, one that’s the case with any major centralized service: when…