- Setting the Scene: How Technology Created a Richer Playset in ‘Toy Story 4’ – The Walt Disney Company
Quote: "Toy Story 4 also features cobwebs—a lot of cobwebs. Jordan describes how one animator wrote a program simulating an A.I. spider building cobwebs: “He guided the spiders to where he wanted them to build cobwebs, and they’d do the job for us. And when you see those cobwebs overlaid on the rest of the scene, it gives the audience the sense that this place has been here for a while.” Without that program, animators would have had to make the webs one strand at a time, which would have taken several months. “You have to tell the spider where the connection points of the cobweb should go,” Jordan says, “but then it does the rest.”"
(categories: ai machine-learning pixar programming )
- Eric’s Guide to Hiring {Software Developers} | Eric Lawler
Awesome rundown of hiring software engineers in 2019.
(categories: hiring management career )
- Self-serve first: the overlooked but essential paradigm underlying great software companies
Quote: "And I’ve been watching this new competitor emerge that’s going after the same market as we are, except from the low end. They are tiny but growing rapidly. And it’s too hard for us to compete with them — we don’t have the people, technology stack, support model or frankly, the mindset."
(categories: self-serve strategy startups saas product-led-growth plg )
- Dysfunctions of output-oriented software teams :: Adam Kalsey
Quote: "Take small steps and look to continually improve. Start by defining success through outcomes and deciding up from what measurements will indicate you have reached those outcomes. Accept that it’s OK if you aren’t always busy. Slack in the schedule is healthy and helps give time to explore and experiment. If you’re not focused on being busy all the time, you’ll be able to think more about creating a flow of value to the customer. Above all, empower people. Trust that the smart, capable people you’ve hired will do the right thing. Try managing through Commander’s Intent: define what success looks like, and then let them figure out how to get there."
(categories: okr kpi outcome customerfocus value )
- Reclaim unreasonable software.
Quote: "The abstract deity known only as business value doesn’t care whether your software is easy to reason about, but it does care quite a bit about your ability to release new features and to operate your software well enough to retain users. At some point, the slowing velocity will become the discussion you have at planning and strategy meetings, with one resounding refrain: the status quo isn’t working."
(categories: software rewrite reclaim value )
- How to Avoid Groupthink When Hiring
Take-aways: 1) make it clear to interviewers that they should not share their interview experiences with each other before the final group huddle, 2) ask each interviewer to perform a few steps before the group huddle: a) distill their interview rating to a single numerical score, b) write down their main arguments for and against hiring this person and their final conclusion. This will help them stay true to their beliefs once the discussion starts, which leads to less biased predictions, c) If interviewers are emailing in their numerical scores and thoughts on a candidate, don’t include the entire group in the email, 3) the hiring managers should take note of the average score for a candidate
(categories: hiring interview management )
- GitHub – microsoft/presidio: Context aware, pluggable and customizable data protection and PII data anonymization service for text and images
Quote: "… data protection and PII data anonymization service for text and images", built in Go / Python. First of these I’ve stumbled upon, without a doubt will be more and more common. What’s the Apache / Java version of this?
(categories: opensource privacy data microsoft )
- Do-nothing scripting: the key to gradual automation – Dan Slimmon
Quote: "A do-nothing script doesn’t save your team any manual effort. It lowers the activation energy for automating tasks, which allows the team to eliminate toil over time." Love this… would love to have this for all kinds of onboarding tasks… eliminate multiple tabs in browsers and having to context switch all the time.
(categories: automation programming onboarding new-hire toil slog )
- Peter Kaufman on The Multidisciplinary Approach to Thinking: Transcript – Latticework Investing
Quote: "… The most powerful force that could be potentially harnessed is dogged incremental constant progress over a very long time frame." and "… trustworthy, principled, courageous, competent, loyal, kind, understanding, forgiving, unselfish, and in every single one of your interactions with others, be the list" and "… There’s this great African proverb. It’s the definition of win-win. ‘If you want to go quickly go alone, if you want to go far, go together.’ Live your life to go far together. Don’t live it to go quickly alone. Most people grow up wanting to go quickly alone. It doesn’t work." Everything about this article. Need to read this again and print it out.
(categories: leadership investing philosophy life career listening )
- How to Provide Great Feedback When You’re Not In Charge
Quote: "… Charlie Munger once said that withholding deserved praise was basically immoral." Seems like a 60 / 30 / 10 rule should be created here (appreciation = 60%, advice = 30%, evaluation = 10%) for feedback.
(categories: advice coaching feedback management psychology )
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