Here’s some useful stuff that kept us excited through December and January:
Thomas has created tons of personas for UX purposes. He finds this pretty helpful, so perhaps you can also learn about reasons why personas often fail to deliver.
Personas are my jam. I teach a full-day training course on them: what they are, why they work, how to create them, and how to use them to do great work. I love demystifying this abstract topic, making it concrete, and addressing common pitfalls that practitioners encounter.
At Railslove, we have often found that people review code differently. Chris discovered this gem, providing some tips on what to keep in mind when reviewing someone’s code. I know, you would have done it so much better …
Our codebases are shared by hundreds of engineers, so it’s critical to make sure we’re not just writing the best code we can, but that the code being written can be understood by others. Taking the time to review someone else’s code is the most critical opportunity to ensure all of that is happening.
Martin found a set of rules. No rules to live by, but rules that shed light on why we work the way we do. This one’s a real mind-blower. Mostly on UX but also on pretty much every aspect of getting shit done.
Any task will inflate until all of the available time is spent. Articulated by Cyril Northcote Parkinson as part of the first sentence of a humorous essay published in The Economist in 1955 and since republished online, it was reprinted with other essays in the book Parkinson’s Law: The Pursuit of Progress.
With Lars, you can discuss the benefits and pitfalls of microservice vs. monolith design a lot. Here’s a nice discussion he dug out for you … for starters.
The Death of Microservice Madness in 2018
Microservices became a very popular topic in over the last couple of years. ‘Microservice madness’ goes something like this: “Netflix are great at devops. Netfix do microservices. Therefore: If I do microservices, I am great at devops.”
How do you observe progress with yourself? Jakob read something about it and found it worth sharing. I second that.
Of all the things that can boost emotions, motivation, and perceptions during a workday, the single most important is making progress in meaningful work. And the more frequently people experience that sense of progress, the more likely they are to be creatively productive in the long run.
From our FinTech Weekly Magazine comes this story, endorsed by Michael, on how open APIs and data distribution in the financial industry are going to deal with intellectual property issues.
Open Banking – Intellectual Property Considerations
There has been much discussion about the impact of Open Banking on compliance with data protection law, including the GDPR, which will come into force on 25 May 2018. It is very important for those considering deploying Open Banking products and services to be aware of their responsibilities and obligations in this regard.
