We write on development, product management, design, technology, and beyond…
October 27, 1994. The first web banner ad was born. HotWired aka Wired placed it on its homepage among the 13 other banners members of the “dirty dozen”. But the legend has this AT&T banner as the forefather of what came to change the way the internet works, and perhaps guide it the wrong way, leading us to the murky waters of 2018’s web.
The internet of today is nowhere near where it was a decade ago. The sporadic occurrence of web-based startups gave way to some of the largest corporate empires in the modern world. The free-spirited and ugly nomadic environment of the early internet turned into a dystopian mogul-owned cloud hanging over the modern world.
The most mythologized painting of the 20th century is Malevich’s Black Square. The piece of work that marked the beginning of a new style, suprematism, is as mysterious as it is sublime. What is it that makes this painting so magical? It has been discovered that the current painting is actually the third layer on top of two previous paintings.
The Mobius 2018 conference held in Saint Petersburg earlier this year featured a talk by the guys from Revolut – Roman Yatsina and Ivan Vazhnov, called Multiplatform architecture with Kotlin for iOS and Android.
The essential part of every tech company business development is constant improvement. Methodologies are introduced all over the place, design trends get thoroughly studied, marketologists build up the hype, and it’s always excelsior.
There’s a popular line that I and my friends who are in their mid-30’s often use in a wide variety of contexts. The line goes: “Bring back my 2007.” In 2007 I’d never had thought I’d be saying that. Even though that wasn’t a really prosperous time for a day-old university graduate, we never think of the 90’s in that sense.
Time and time again Google has been proving why they are the best. Even though this is a hell of a jaded statement, they really are. There’s no other way around it. How Google influences our digital being is hard to even evaluate.
The mobile-first application development trend has reshaped the way we expect our content to be delivered to us. There are not a lot of areas where web-based applications prevail over the mobile ones. At least entertainment-wise, we are totally sold on the iPhone or Android apps. One of the most accustomed to and secretly painstaking qualities of mobile apps is the speed and smoothness of transitions between screens.
For the past year, word design or UX writing solidified itself as a legit part of digital design, namely UI and UX. The request for a clear and concise copy has always been out there and in different periods of time, it reflected the social realms of its time.
“Don’t worry, human intelligence will never be replaced by machines.” That’s what I was told as a freshman foreign languages student at a university. That was the time the concerns about the machine translation taking over the human, first came up. For an honest average playgoer, language is nothing but a set of words put in a specific order based on some (not so) simple rules. Learning languages is a grind. Knowing languages is extremely rewarding.
The Lean Startup methodology rests on the proverbial pillars that come as no surprise first time you read about it. Here they are:
As an aspiring startup owner or a successful entrepreneur, you’ve been focusing on polishing your product or service to the point where it becomes an up-market commodity you are proud of. You know its worth and you know how to sell it to the customer. You know where to start but hardly see where the journey might lead you.
In 2012, when working as a tech writer at a production company, I made a business trip to one of Henkel’s manufacturing facilities with a task to study their logistical business process formal description and documents. I won’t remember a word from those docs but what I will always remember is what I was later. After doing what I was supposed to, I was taken on a highlight tour all across the facility, including the chemical production site where I saw heavy machinery operating on robotics, long multi-level conveyor bands transporting thousands of bottles of chemicals and I also was let in the control center where all the numerous processes were being operated from.
For decades, hiring has been Achilles’ heel of digital product outsourcing. Before everything else comes team building. To build a team you need a steady supply of professionals. Finding the right people to join your team is a challenge that a lot of teams struggle with. The following is the story of our hiring, our bumps and bruises with recruitment, and how we’ve come to a full-blown HR department in a company that is all standing up for outsourcing.
Generally, we treat our every new digital project as an exciting opportunity to step up, a journey that will take us to new heights, or a nice feather in the cap of your design, development, or company portfolio.
