State of Technology Last Week - #2

#at_other_places –

• Power of Social Media — Facebook can be used to prevent suicide
• And, can help detect cancer.
• Not so good – can increase stalking, in form of an app
• Literally facebook? – using face recognition to find soul mate!
• Be careful to roll your eyes too soon – Touch-screen is passé. New Lenovo laptop (prototype) ‘can be controlled with eye motions’
• More on eyes — an iPhone app to help Blind identify currency

#architecture – ‘The MIT 150 exhibition’ – ‘unique exhibition made up of stories and objects that members of the MIT community helped to select, collect and make available to the public, many for the first time’ – ‘Virus Battery’ is cool, but ‘MIT-Hardvard Merger Petition’ was revolutionary.

#code – ‘New Interview Questions for Senior Software Engineers’ – even though the author clarifies – “I think we all agree (or at least we should) that if you go into an interview tomorrow and you look across the table and the interviewer has simply printed out this list and is reading from it, that you should excuse yourself and run”, the list is well compiled and the comments are entertaining.

#design – Why ‘Angry Birds’ is so popular – a ‘cognitive teardown of the user experience’ – amazing analysis ranging from ‘short-term memory management’ to ‘faster is better’ paradigm that resulted 200 million minutes a day engagement

#longread – One of the rare profiles of Jack Dorsey at Vanity Fair – apparently he got the Twitter idea from ‘haiku of Taxicab communication – the way drivers and dispatchers succinctly convey locations by radio’

#mobile – Mobile UI Patterns – from Check-in screens to Sign-up flows to Splash Screens

#saas – Zero to 1M users – What lessons did Dropbox and Xobni learn?

#etc

• Accounting for Computer Scientists – ‘basic accounting is just graph theory’

• Music with awk

#parting_thought – ‘Maybe you won’t be the next Donald Knuth, but that’s not what it takes, all you need to be is a little bit better than you were yesterday and to keep doing that for a long time.’ – from ‘The Need to Code’