March 2015 Articles

Apple has sourced 60 fantastic photographs and a few time lapse clips into an online gallery on apple.com. Apple is also being reportedly posting these pictures as billboards across the globe.

Absolutely terrific photographs. Check them out.

Rethinking Office Space sells it short. Google and Bjarke Ingels at BIG and Thomas Heatherwick at Heatherwick Studio have reimagined what an office space — no a company community — can look like.

See also, photos of the proposed new campus.

“A trip to Silicon Valley to meet Vivek Wadhwa, this month’s most controversial man in tech”

An introduction to Annie Jean Easley, a 34-year veteran NASA mathematician and woman of color who worked at the agency from 1955 to 1989.

Recently, someone multiple generations ahead of me and well respected in Silicon Valley told me that I’m a pioneer. The implication was that I’m the first to look like I do and do what I do professionally. That I’m creating a new path for future generations to follow. That’s a lot of pressure to put on the shoulders of someone still establishing herself - it’s also an incorrect assertion that discredits the achievements made by my predecessors. I can’t entirely fault this individual’s ignorance. The historical contributions of minorities and women in America haven’t been remembered with particular clarity and have often been purposefully denied their due credit.

Perspective from Ben Thompson on journalism, or rather storytelling, in the age of the Internet.

In short, by not making money from display ads, and by extension deprioritizing page views, BuzzFeed incentivizes its writers to fully embrace Internet assumptions, and just as importantly disincentivizes pure sensationalism. There is no self-editing or consideration of whether or not a particular post will make money, or if it will play well on the home page, or dishonestly writing a headline just to drive clicks. The only goal is to create — or find — something that resonates.

One of the most important problems in technology is hiring qualified engineers, and yet our industry is terrible at it.

Years from now, we’ll look back at the 2015 developer interview as an anachronism, akin to hiring an orchestra cellist with a personality test and a quiz about music theory rather than a blind audition.

Successful interviewing demands a basket of skills that doesn’t correlate with job performance. The world is full of people who can speak expertly about programming, but can’t effectively code, while the majority of people who can code can’t do it well in an interview. Our hiring process is systematically mispricing candidates–and employers could profit from correcting this problem.

I told her we were going to get married, and all she could talk about was frogs.

She said there’s these hills where it’s hot and rains all the time, and in the rain forest there are these very tall trees right in top branches of the trees there are these like great big flowers called…bromelaids, I think, and water gets into the flowers and makes little pools and there’s a type of frog that lays eggs in the pools and tadpoles hatch and grow into new frogs and these little frogs live their whole lives in the flowers right at the top of the trees don’t even know about the ground, and once you know the world is full of things like that, your life is never the same.

Fantastic peek into some of the processes that go into manufacturing an Apple Watch, all sourced from Apple’s marketing videos on each version of the Apple Watch: aluminum (Sport), stainless steel (Watch), gold (Edition).

Rick Tetzeli and Brent Schlender, authors of the upcoming book Becoming Steve Jobs, interview Tim Cook about the culture at Apple and its core values.

Steve was almost viewed from the exterior as the micromanager checking to make sure that every i was dotted, and every t was crossed, that every circuit was correct, that every color was exactly right. And yes, he made a lot of decisions. His capacity was unbelievable. But he was just one person–and he knew that.

It was his selection of people that helped propel the culture. You hear these stories of him walking down a hallway and going crazy over something he sees, and yeah, those things happened. But extending that story to imagine that he did everything at Apple is selling him way short. What he did more than anything was build a culture and pick a great team, that would then pick another great team, that would then pick another team, and so on.

It’s more about the people on your team and the culture you create than any one person.

Be your own TV channel. Broadcast when you want and have your friends and followers notified when you’re broadcasting. A brave new world.