Trending onwards and upwards
This week's theme: Onward(adjective): Going further rather than coming to an end or halt; moving forward.
The sun has set on 2020, and everything happening around us would say otherwise - folks are still getting sick, the world economy is in an uncertain state, division of beliefs is at a boiling point - and yet, almost every person I’ve been talking with this week is persisting forward, making magical things happen. People are starting bold new career paths, hustling for the sake of the environment, taking life on the road, publishing books, and pursuing new dreams. You know who you are. 😉
Choosing to move forward is step 1. Step 2 is finding your source of inspiration and motivation to keep going. New community structures are particularly inspiring to me at the moment - take the thefour.live conference, for example. It's a changemaker hackathon organizing people around our world’s most urgent and systemic issues.
There is an opening and an invitation in 2021 to look at things differently and reinvent systems. It’s actually a bit expected. It might even be necessary.
A word to the wise: stay curious. Who knows what could be around the corner this year?
As Walt Disney once said, "we keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we're curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths."
🏬 Epic Games, maker of Fortnite, repurposing 1M sq ft shopping mall in North Carolina to be their new headquarters
Epic Games — Malls are dying, which are no surprise in the wake of online shopping and more recently, COVID. It’s a little creepy to imagine these vacant centers - you can’t help but imagine the setting for some of your favorite horror video games. Thankfully, a mall in Cary Towne Center, N.C. will be refactored as an office building and recreation center for Epic Games.
🙋🏽 User research over Zoom can be just as good as in-person sessions - remote-friendly tips and tricks for scaling user research
dScout — A useful framework for not only running usability sessions, but also for understanding the potential benefits from incorporating remote UX testing into your operations strategy. One of the main benefits: more equal representation in the results. The most important factor to success: your pre-session and post-session rituals.
🚎 Microsoft tackles remote culture by adding a “Virtual Commute” feature, where you can block out chunks on your calendar for daily reflection
Microsoft — Set to be released this year, Microsoft is designing a “virtual commute” feature for Teams, which will encourage users to block out some time at the beginning and end of each day to set goals and reflect. This feature is intended to be a replacement for the time you’d normally get in your daily commute to work in the car or on the train, pre-COVID.
🖍 Draw me an illustration of a baby daikon radish in a tutu walking a dog, please. Oh wait, Open AI’s DALL-E can do it for me, nvm.
Open AI — There is a bit of a stir in the tech community this week over DALL-E. While this is not as obscure as some of our other articles, it’s worth mentioning because of the impact it could have not only on artists and illustrators, but potentially for anyone who creates digital things that other people describe. We can’t wait for this to be in the beta program, so that we can play with it.
🗃 Have you been looking to explore serverless but don't want to rewrite everything? Maybe you can start with one piece first - your HTML forms
Jamform — This mini service may seem like a small thing (it's just form submissions right?) but it packs a punch. Jamform allows you to quickly add forms to the web and manage the submitted data all in one place, even allow file submission! Collect anything from an email address for a product launch to a custom design for physical good production. Jamform has what you need to help push on with your next product idea.
🪞 What I've learned in 45 years in software — a lot about humility and making things simple
Joel Goldberg — Talk about "lessons learned"! This historic article of a retrospective from Joel Goldberg has a ton of value in a concise writeup. Fundamental lessons from a great career we can all take forward in our own. I particularly like section 2 about the timeless fundamentals of software development as a team.
🐦 Async culture on Slack - 11 tweets that sum up an entire company's communications strategy, open sourced
David Booth — This Twitter thread has made the rounds early 2021 describing a technique for using Slack as a remote team to help create more value from text conversations and help each other stay focused and productive. David makes mention of several tips for threading, emoji, and a couple tools like Look and Talk-Talk.
As always, special shoutout to Taylor Beseda for helping curate this content.
Follow him on twitter @tbeseda.