I constantly find myself looking for that one link to the great article on X that I read about that would be really helpful right now. Maybe a personal awesome list would help.
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33 rules to be an artist — similar to The Artist's Way, tips, exercises, exhortations on how to be creative.
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I'm sure my boyfriend is secretly in love with his co-worker — "Your boyfriend isn’t obsessed with this woman, you are. You’re obsessed with her because you want to become an artist."
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Some things that Milton Glaser said to my SVA class — he was a wise man. And he had some good morals.
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Don't write alone — resources to help you with the practice of writing, things like prompts, essays, people, pictures. So that you do this thing not on your own.
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Garlic in fiction — advice from Shirley Jackson on how to make your writing interesting. You've got to use your linguistic devices like you'd use garlic to make something tasty.
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The oxymoron of "data driven innovation" — data driven developed centres product work on the majority. Great products are made by focusing on those who are underserved by current products and markets. That's how you do innovation. So look to underserved groups to build your product innovatively and effectively.
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Top 90+ Resources for Product Managers — this is superb, so many canonical articles. First place to go for PM related thinking.
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The first principles of product management — maximise impact to the mission and achieve everything through others. Long, good.
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Product management mental models — great list of mental models to use in product management. They are the little shorthands you pick up through experience to help familiarise yourself in new territory. Examples: local maxima, ship earlier for customer value, key failure indicator (love that one).
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Product Launch Checklist — very comprehensive spreadsheet covering product launch activities.
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Testing microservices in production: the sane way — the first in the epic five part series about testing in production by Cindy Sridharan. I agree with about 99.5% of this, it is just superb.
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How facebook manages releasing loads of software all the time
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De-risking custom technology projects — 18F repo with a playbook, with a lot of the basics around software dev, product, teams, budgets etc. Probably most relevant to larger orgs that struggle with tech projects.
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Git magic — a comprehensive and easy to understand guide to git. Epic.
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The git pickaxe — has the amazing
git log -p -S thingto search for when "thing" was added as well as a bunch of other tips. -
The front end checklist — great list for kicking off any front end projects.
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Regexr — I struggle a lot with Regex, this tool to try out regexs in the browser helps.
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Upcase — guides and lessons for intermediate level developers, mainly in ruby and rails but generic things too.
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Makefiles — subtitled "Afraid of Makefiles? Don't be!". Covers the basics quickly and clearly.
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Design Principles — an open source collection of design principles and systems that various organisations have published.
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Form design: from zero to hero all in one blog post — all the tips on how to build good web forms.
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Butterick’s Practical Typography — web based book that covers everything to do with using effective typography in your designs.
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Type foundry index — a list of lots of online type foundries, including the ones that have free trials.
- Working with files in elixir — useful reminders on the basics of working with files.
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My favourite rands articles are: The update, the vent and the disaster, Say the hard thing, Don't YOLO hard conversations, and Gossip, rumours and lies. Those are the ones I can think of right now.
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The rands test — test for health of your organisation, sort of strategy equivalent to the Joel test
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Building a first team mindset — how to get into the thought that your executive peers are your team and work with them rather than silo-ing.
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Culture doesn't come later — overview of what organisational culture consists in, why it is important and some views on how to work on it.
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How to be strategic — really good article, very practical.
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The power of ten playbook — this is great. The way I want to build a new product.
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Building Inclusive Engineering Teams — the talk outlining the why and the how of building inclusive teams. So much that I kinda know but put super clearly. By Mekka Okereke, an engineering manager at Google.
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Who I want to work for — Great list of characteristics of someone you'd want to work for, by GitHub senior engineer @keavy.
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Do I truly want to be a manager — good questions to make sure peeps who want to become a manager have a reasonable expectation of what it involves. Also good to read now and again to remind yourself of what I myself should be looking at.
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How privilege defines performance — beautiful slides carefully breaking down how privilege works to build a systematic bias in societies and how we are all part of it (both privileged and not). There's the video of the talk too.
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Engineering management: the pendulum or the ladder — lots of peeps talk about this kind of thing but Charity has some far out opinions. Similar to this rands podcast.
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Doing presentations — the OG. The only way I know how to do presentations. One sentence per slide.
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Strategic thinking with blogs and stickers — a wonderfully clear bit of explanation of how you can communicate and embed your strategy through seemingly low key tools.
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How to socialize changes at work — this is pretty much exactly what I think about introducing change into teams. This part is about finding allies and how to introduce your idea. It's as if I wrote it.
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The weekly CEO email — the how and why of sending a weekly CEO update. Short version: you definitely need to do this. Possibly worth doing in any leadership role.
Tweek — this is pretty much how I like to have my todo list set up. I use Things quite heavily at work because it is easy to capture things and used to use Trello for all other things but this is decent approximation of how my brain works in simple mode.
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Google Data Studio — where have you been all my life! I've built this in excel soooooo many times, a way of building dashboards from tonnes of datasources, very excited to use this more.
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Flourish, a tool for visualising data — would be fun to play with this.
- Tachyons — front end framework for building clean sites. Built my current blog incarnation with this.
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Swedish cardamom buns — I'd been working on making cardamom buns for ages with a few different recipes and it wasn't going great. Then one day I was doing my usual reading of uses this when I came across this recipe in the post of the wonderful Darra Goldstein, linguist and cookbook writer extrordinare! Reader, they were marvellous.
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Soft white baps — Dan Lepard's recipe for soft white baps. Makes a huge and fluffy roll for a breakfast bap.
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Moro sourdough — we've got this one in the book too but useful to have it on the phone.
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How to shine shoes — the world shoe shine champion shows how to shine and get a mirror finish.
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Negroni season — a story from the internet. Not really about Negronis.