There is a famous post by Jason Goldberg while at Betashop called “13 Things You Must Do Every Week As A Startup CEO”. Original link seems to be down, hence I’d like to help Jason’s advice be more discoverable. Content:

1. Remember your One Thing. Your startup can only do one thing well at a time. Know Your One Thing. Write it on the wall. Repeat it every day. Put it at the top of every regular company-wide communication. Don’t let anything distract you and your team from it.

2. Remember that you’re only as good as The Team around you. Spend time cultivating your team. Bring in people who are better at their jobs than you could ever be. Motivate them and drive them to do things they never thought they could do. Give them freedom to roam and discover while guiding them towards the One Thing. Treat your co-workers like family. Startups can be a grind. Getting your team to love being part of...

For the past few years i’ve been increasingly annoyed with state of native apps in OSX (ditto for any other desktop OS), and pleased with the state of web apps. I’m talking launch speed and accessibility.

4 years ago already, it was faster to open a browser tab with Google Spreadsheets rather MS Excel or Apple Numbers. It is faster to spell check via Google Search rather than with OSX’s dictionary. It’s faster to open any IM or TODO app in a tab, rather than in native app.

…ditto for pretty much any other daily-usage mid-sophistication app.

Hence a few questions.

What’s wrong with OS environments, SDKs, or whatever that makes a whole range of apps significantly slower to load (and sometimes, execute) on desktop OS?

Let’s assume this question is trivial to many — and I’m sure there are plenty of software engineers with great experience in native & web apps. I dont know the exact...

TIL 6 key principles of influence by Robert Cialdini

1. Reciprocity – People tend to return a favor, thus the pervasiveness of free samples in marketing. In his conferences, he often uses the example of Ethiopia providing thousands of dollars in humanitarian aid to Mexico just after the 1985 earthquake, despite Ethiopia suffering from a crippling famine and civil war at the time. Ethiopia had been reciprocating for the diplomatic support Mexico provided when Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935. The good cop/bad cop strategy is also based on this principle.
2. Commitment and Consistency – If people commit, orally or in writing, to an idea or goal, they are more likely to honor that commitment because of establishing that idea or goal as being congruent with their self-image. Even if the original incentive or motivation is removed after they have already agreed, they will continue to honor the...

‪‎Ads‬. All around web, for the past couple of months, I was targeted and retargeted with all types of different ads, relevant to my various google searches, browsing, clicks, etc… Business as usual.

2 hours ago, over Google Hangouts, I mentioned to a friend of mine, that
“I’m going to gym”.

Went to gym. Came back.

Now, I’m i’m taking rest, opening Facebook and starting watching a music video, that my other friend have posted…

What do I see?

YouTube video starts with a 5 minute advertisement about “weight loss”.
I click on another random link… On a right hand side I see a banner about how to “trim your belly in no time"… i click — "our weight loss program…”

I mentioned “gym” via Hangouts, now I’m targeted with “weight loss” ads everywhere.

And there is no way back. We should part with our desires for “privacy” and leave this word to history books.

Internet is the storage.
Your device is just cache.

Modern apps should not prompt what to upload to cloud. Upload everything by default. Prompt what to keep on your device.

QA [quality assurance] is a step in your web development cycle. As soon as you create a role/job/department for QA whole tech team will delegate QA to that person/department. Eventually, when something goes wrong you’ll start the blame game…

QA should be done by CI automation, devs, PMs and by users.

What?! By users?!
— Yes. And it does not have to be a negative experience. It might and should be a positive one. Maybe only by a certain group of your customers — loyal, brave, privileged users, “innovators” and “hackers”. Give them a discount for every bug they find! Encourage, be vulnerable — they’ll sympathise and be your advocates.

Remember how Facebook engineers translated the site in other languages? They crowdsourced it from their users. Users did not get upset at all — they treated it as a game, challenge.

Ideas on how to actually crowdsource QA:

• Have a “beta-production”...

You can observe same structure in literature, music, films, relationships, success processes.

That’s also how I see and approach many things in life.