Machine-driven
Via Buzz Andersen, Google products are machine-driven. They’re created by machines. And that is what makes us powerful. That’s what makes our products great. Marissa Mayer, In the Plex Explains why their design comes up short.
Design is Horseshit
@yongfook, writing in Design is Horseshit!, makes a good point: Focus on value creation. Design enhances value, it does not create it. Stop creating shitty startups that look amazing. He’s not saying that you should dump design and designers (phew!), just that he is sick of over-designed new startups that provide no real value. Money quote: Think hard about what problem you can solve that a customer will give you $10 for and work your ass off at delivering that $10 of value as fast and as cheaply as possible.
Seek the Criticism
Brendan Baker nails it in Fuck the Accolades. Seek the Criticism on Quora. Just read it. It’s short. Two productive things can come out of a meeting with a VC: They help you directly. Money or connections. They make you better. They criticize you where it counts. They poke holes. They make you defend. They make you justify. They make you question. Seek the criticism, because accolades don’t help you.
Don't give up on your techs
My good friend, Brad Lindenberg, writing in The diminishing value of technical founders in startups talks about the value of the super technical people needed to perform the heavy lifting at the beginning of a startup. This value of technical people in startups diminishes quicker than you think and entrepreneurs need to be careful not to give away equity to developers who are super valuable in the short term, but end up twiddling their thumbs in the long term.
The usage lifecycle
Joshua Porter writes about the Usage Lifecycle in Designing for the Social Web: The Usage Lifecycle, well worth reading. The stages in the Usage Lifecycle of a product are: • Unaware This isn’t so much a stage as it is a starting point. Most people are in this stage: completely unaware of your product. • Interested These people are interested in your product, but are not yet users. They have lots of questions about how it works and what value it provides.
The lost art of the print statement
Debugging software is hard, especially if you were not the original author. All programming languages come with debugging tools, from the arcane GDB to the dead sexy step-through debuggers in Xcode and Visual Studio. But, having watched some newbies recently attempt to debug some code using these tools, I noticed something. With all the data in the world on their screens, breakpoints, stacks, watches and code hovers, the information they needed to solve the bug was being lost is the mix.
Write code for someone else
Whether you are just hacking up a script, writing the next must-have app, or working for the man, always be writing code as if someone else has to read it and understand it. Usually, that someone else is you, six months into the future, older, wiser, with a different mindset. And you’d hate to piss yourself off then, right? This hiltmonism is a big one. Its easy to think you can fix something later, even though you know this mysterious later never comes.
Kindle Fire lets kids charge up a storm
Reuters, today, in Amazon’s Kindle Fire lets kids charge up a storm writes: …it comes with your Amazon account information preloaded, along with “1-Click” ordering. That means anyone who is holding that device can place an order, whether it’s their account or not. My question is whether this behavior is by design or by accident. In Almost No-one Changes Their Settings I referred an example from Microsoft where the settings were the result of what the developer left them as, not what was best for the user.
Information, not Data
How many times have you opened a spreadsheet or a system, and seen pages and pages of numbers and gone ‘Ugh, its too hard to find what I want!’. Most systems and spreadsheets try to present everything to their users, reams and reams of raw unfettered data. And most users, if you ask them, both want the data and hate the data volume that they have to deal with. Looking closer at the situation, the reason they want the raw data is because they believe they can use the data to get answers to their questions, or use the data to do their jobs.
Don't be a free user
Maciej Ceglowski, writing on the Pinboard blog in Don’t Be A Free User calling it as it is. Someone builds a cool, free product, it gets popular, and that popularity attracts a buyer. The new owner shuts the product down and the founders issue a glowing press release about how excited they are about synergies going forward. They are never heard from again. His point is valid. All the businesses he refers to started as a free service, had no business model, got sold and died.