The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius Quote: "I’ve always liked Hamming’s famous double-barrelled question: what are the most important problems in your field, and why aren’t you working on one of them? It’s a great way to shake yourself up. But it may be overfitting a bit. It might be at least as useful to ask yourself: if you could take a year off to work on something that probably wouldn’t be important but would be really interesting, what would it be?" (categories: ideasinnovationtimefocus )
Better presentations through storytelling and STAR moments Quote: "Every talk should start with an AIM: Audience, Intent, Message. Who are the audience for the talk? What do you intend to achieve by giving the presentation? With those two things in mind, you can construct the message—the actual content of the talk. Try to include at least one STAR moment—Something They’ll Always Remember. This can be a gimmick, a repeated theme, a well-selected video or audio clip. Something to help the talk stand out. The human brain is incredibly attuned to stories. If you can find an excuse to tell a story, no matter how thin that excuse is, take it." (categories: presentationsstoryspeaking )
A Failed SaaS Postmortem · Matt Layman Quote: "Where I was horribly wrong was in thinking that Ember and Semantic were the only pieces of new technology that I needed. The list was so much longer and included: Datadog for infrastructure monitoring. DigitalOcean for virtual machine hosting. Django REST Framework for APIs. Drip for marketing email campaigns. Jekyll for the marketing site. JSON API as a communication protocol. Let’s Encrypt for TLS certificates. Mailgun for transactional emails. Mixpanel for behavior analysis. Rollbar for error tracking. Segment for data aggregation. Stripe for recurring payments. wal-e for database backups. webpack for JavaScript asset bundling" (categories: innovation-tokenstechnology )