These days, most of my work is very related to the online world. Building web sites, reviewing web applications, integrating with web services, coordinating people who are far away from each other, etc. Whenever I find a new tool or service or an innovative, interesting idea about working online, I share it in this category.
Pulled from the web, here is a great collection of eBooks (most of which have a physical version that you can purchase on Amazon) written on the topics of Data Science, Business Analytics, Data Mining, Big Data, Machine Learning, Algorithms, Data Science Tools, and Programming Languages for Data Science.
Most notably, there are introductory books, handbooks, Hadoop guide, SQL books, social media data mining stuff, and d3 tips and tricks. There’s also plenty on artificial intelligence and machine learning, but that’s too far out for me.
Fixing Twitter – here’s a reasonable rant on what’s wrong with Twitter and how to fix it. Product managers and marketing people should definitely read.
Second–and this one is obvious to almost everyone–Twitter needs to focus on realtime events. When I open Twitter during a major debate in the US, or when a bomb has exploded in Bangkok, there should be a huge fиcking banner at the top that says “follow this breaking event.” It shouldn’t just search for a hashtag–it should use intelligent algorithms to show me all of the relevant content about that event. It should be the place you go to learn about what is happening in the world right now. When something major happens in the world/your country/your city, you should be trained to immediately and automatically think, “open Twitter to get updates.” This is so obvious to me that I wonder what Twitter’s product team has been doing—are they over-designing a solution to this? It’s so simple. 90% of the UI and 80% of the search functionality is already in the app.
I came across an excellent blog post on full stack developers – “The full stack developer is a myth“. I do much agree on what is being said there. Firstly, the stack itself.
Non-exhaustive list of a technical stack layers and components
Secondly, on the problem:
A full stack developer is a myth not because none exist, but because the term is meaningless. It’s no different from a coding ninja or rockstar, but at least everyone knows those terms don’t actually mean anything.
Even limiting the term to a more specific context like web stack or mobile stack, you’d still get quite a bit of technology for a single person. And yes, it’s changing a lot and fast too!
Every year there are new components added to each layer and every couple of years there’s a new layer added to it. Is it really reasonable to put out job applications asking for a full stack developer? It’s not only unreasonable, it’s stupid. Particularly when you start looking for one person who’s an expert in security, web development, UX, and servers; and this isn’t at all an uncommon expectation.
More so, there is a geographical component to this as well. If you are in a small country like Cyprus, with very few technical establishments, even further down simplifying the stack won’t help you much. Finding a web developer with good knowledge of HTTP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, and MySQL is already a challenge. And that’s like three or four layers…
I came across this list of 11 highly underrated plugins for WordPress. I wouldn’t go as far as call of them highly underrated, as some of them are rather highly rated. But that’s not the point. I wanted to share the list especially for these three:
This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may affect your browsing experience.
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.
