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Startups are so much more then cool product

To be honest I never really understood what marketing was about. And I don’t think I fully get it now but as one of the cool sides of working for startup is to be exposed to all sides of the business. I’d like to say thank you to our Director of Marketing for showcasing marketing magic to anyone who is interested in learning more about on daily basis.

To run successful startup business you need

  • marketing
  • sales
  • taking care of financial side of business
  • taking good care of customers
  • having product vision
  • engineering team capable to implement it.

And all these sides are equally important.

 

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Pi Day in NYC trip

Happy Pi Day. I’m spending it with BlueCart New York Team. Productive and chill visit at the same time. Thank you, guys and gals. Green bagels and jalapeno M&Ms are awesome!

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Productivity or Rescuing your time

Productivity is the word of the decade for sure (or several decades even). What is it? Everyone has to define it for themselves. My definition is simple: it’s the feeling you get after good day of work, you know – “good tired” kind. When one enjoys the process, sees results and is clear on priorities. More than a year ago I took an advice from a colleague (thank you Erin Recachinas) and enrolled into RescueTime. Here is my productivity report for 2018. The moment one takes on a leadership role balancing act starts. My goal is to balance my management tasks and my engineering tasks. It differs from month to month of course (priorities and where I’m at my most value for company) but overall I’m satisfied with my report and my results.

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Who invented modern job interview?

A bit of a trivia. Recently I was reading one of Erik Dietrich books and learned that modern job interview was invented by Tomas Edison. Edison used to go through a lot of candidates and at some point was extremely frustrated that the college graduates would lack knowledge that he found essential in someone who would want to work for him. As a result he came up with a “test” that had series of questions of general knowledge. Some of these questions related directly to the position that the applicant was seeking, while others were related to topics such as geography, history or literature. It’s unlikely that more than about 7% of all applicants could pass Edison’s test. Apparently an industry wanted to emulate Edison and began using similar questionnaires of their own. More info here.

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Software Architecture vs Software Design

Software architecture is what adopts non-functional requirements like reliability, flexibility, scalability, feasibility, reusability, security, etc into a working product or service that meets the technical and the business expectations. Software design is the process of translating functional, business requirements into code level design ideally following SOLID principle and applicable design patterns. More details are here. I especially liked comparison of Monolith Architecture and very popular at the moment Microservices Architecture.

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“Getting Started With User Experience Design”​ as a weekend project

I got email this morning inviting me to sign up for quick UX Design course for free. Being a techie I truly respect the work UX Designers do so I decided to take a quick weekend challenge (plus it is free) and do the course. Getting through the first section already gave me a pretty good glimpse into UX designer mindset.

What UX designers do: 

  1. Take bad experiences away
  2. Match technology to the way people think
  3. Learn how people interact with system
  4. Understand that UX is a human side of technology
  5. Try to get the best possible results by combining person and a technology
  6. Help customers to understand their users so together they will craft delightful and usable experience

What is the difference between UI and UX?

UI (user interface) is similar to interior design where you see pictures of the room.

UX (user experience) is when you are the user of the real room and having user experience by trying to use or interact with anything in there. If room was designed well enough by doing user surveys, learning user needs and pain points, doing research and user validation testing you are going to have best UX in your newly redesigned room.

Three sections to go with the real problem to solve as a part of the course.

Check this course out if you have some spare time on this cold winter weekend considering that you are in DC