Redesigning IMDB Thinking Database Design For the ones who are not aware of this amazing website, IMDB literally means Internet Movies Database. IMDB is “the world’s most popular and authoritative source for movie, TV and celebrity content” and by “popular”, we mean it: the website brings over 160…

Silicon Valley's Youth Problem. http://t.co/SK5JSAnpKA CC @waddal, @LenSteenkamp, @wildebees, @kobusehlers

We Don’t Sell Saddles Here The memo below was sent to the team at Tiny Speck, the makers of Slack , on July 31st, 2013 . It had been a little under seven months since development began and was two weeks before the launch of Slack’s ‘Preview Release’. It is presented verbatim, as written (including…

#mustreads from other sites: Bizarre Shadowy Paper-Based Payment System Being Rolled Out Worldwide / by @polemitis / http://t.co/eaxkAeZrKb

MagicBands and the future of data science http://t.co/I6SJuxwdlC

The idea of "eating one's own dog food," or dog fooding, goes back a long way--most notably, with companies using their own software to demonstrate the technology's performance and value. Today, many companies are dogfooding their APIs, not only to demonstrate the APIs' benefits but also to put the…

5 Rules For Writing Great Interface Copy By John Zeratsky http://t.co/gdRvck7wj0 via @FastCoDesign

.@jeffjarvis kicks off a three-part series on the future of news: https://t.co/T21xqcnJ9g, https://t.co/yIrkV1SdJD, https://t.co/MvcKLbiQmh

Pandora's very interesting approach to affinity diagrams for product prioritization and roadmap planning: http://t.co/nccsS2J6lG

Demystifying Secret A peek into the fox hole photo by Denis Dumoulin Update (10/10/2014): We plan to migrate our backend services to AWS by early 2015. A simple thought or your innermost desire can anonymously spread around the world in less than a second, starting with only you and your friends.…

There’s so many facets to cryptocurrencies. Since I’ve been deep into the trenches, there’s just so many new great things about it that hasn’t been able before. Things like smart property , decentralized contracts (that can disrupt civil law, arbitration , etc), payment channels , colored coins ,…

Good read on the development of Shazam http://t.co/dbNgpSv9Yl

Well worth a read for product designers/managers. Why new features usually flop. http://t.co/Vxd479sFfc

"The Future of Personal Broadcasting" by @Superfection https://t.co/9pDcPLpYnH

Allen Zhang organized the team in Guangzhou that began in 2010 to develop the Weixin app for the Internet company Tencent. Qilai Shen for The New York Times SHANGHAI — Every half-hour or so, Jenny Zhao, young and wired, unlocks her iPhone 5 to connect with friends using Weixin , China’s wildly…

A little earlier today, having read how Sky broadband had blocked the jQuery CDN I tweeted Sky broadband erroneously blocks http://t.co/5i7EXxYlDy and that’s why we don’t depend on JavaScript, kids. — Drew McLellan (@drewm) January 27, 2014 To which many responded this is why we don’t rely on CDN s…

So you want to manage a product? What no one tells you about the role Is it just me or are there a lot of aspiring product managers out there? Maybe it’s just because I am one myself, but I feel like all I hear these days is that people who are not product managers — consultants, MBA candidates,…

Be sure check out @pmarca's Why #Bitcoin Matters post http://t.co/Ov2Hp4M5N0 BE SURE TO READ comments on Reddit: http://t.co/Fm8OpML10Y

Written by Justin on January 17, 2014 Ever since I published the revenue numbers for my side-projects, I’ve been getting this question a lot: “YOU HAVE 4 KIDS AND A FULL-TIME JOB?! Where do you find the time for side-projects?” When I answer, I’m tempted to make up something that sounds really…

@monteiro killed it again "10 Things I Love About You" https://t.co/Gf8OWVB5Kp

In early 2005, as demand for Silicon Valley engineers began booming , Apple's Steve Jobs sealed a secret and illegal pact with Google's Eric Schmidt to artificially push their workers wages lower by agreeing not to recruit each other's employees, sharing wage scale information, and punishing…

Abe http://t.co/ISb3aC89Pk I know a lot of people who want to start some kind of business or project. But they start big and never finish

Owen Freeman IN my last year on Wall Street my bonus was $3.6 million — and I was angry because it wasn’t big enough. I was 30 years old, had no children to raise, no debts to pay, no philanthropic goal in mind. I wanted more money for exactly the same reason an alcoholic needs another drink: I was…

THIRTEEN MONTHS AGO Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, the richest twentysomething in history, reached out to Snapchat’s Evan Spiegel, who oversees a revenue-less app that makes photos disappear, with an invitation, delivered to his personal e-mail account: Come to Menlo Park and let’s get to know each…

I started Puppet Labs in 2005. We grew to three people in 2008, and had 231 employees at the end of 2013. Along this path of building a company, I’ve been asked all manner of questions, and they vary depending on the stage of the company or the questioner. One question seems to be persistent, and it…

Silicon Valley is a place that is just as much about people reinventing themselves as it is about people reinventing industries. As a new year turns, it’s time to go through that silly (but actually necessary) exercise of pausing to reflect. In a world of endless e-mail and distractions, it’s hard…

Drew Houston, CEO of Dropbox. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired Dropbox went dark over the weekend. According to the company, the widespread outage was the result of a bug it introduced while updating the hundreds of computer servers that drive its massively popular file-sharing service. But the problem…

Earlier this week, Google bought Nest, a connected devices company, for $3.2 billion. This might seem like an ungodly sum for a company that makes thermostats and smoke detectors, but it makes absolute sense. Nest's products are beautifully designed, their team is overflowing with talent, and they…

“San Francisco and the Storm of Progress” by @k_b_mcfarland https://t.co/OBDyBMwzr3

Nathan Barry’s Lessons Learned Selling $355,759 on Gumroad by Travis Nichols Nathan Barry is a designer, writer, and teacher. He’s the author of The App Design Handbook , Designing Web Applications , and Authority . He’s the founder and designer of ConvertKit, and he was an early seller on Gumroad.…

James Stout explains how Responsive Design won’t fix your usability issues for you . If your site is bad before the redesign, those problems won’t just magically go away once you’ve gone responsive. It’s a good article, and I especially like this bit: But in the face of all this great technology,…