In part, it’s not your fault. If you grew up and went to school in the United States, you were educated in a system that has eight times as many high-school football teams as high schools that teach advanced placement computer-science classes. Things are hardly better in the universities. According to one recent report, in the next decade American colleges will mint 40,000 graduates with a bachelor’s degree in computer science, though the U.S. economy is slated to create 120,000 computing jobs that require such degrees. You don’t have to be a math major to do the math: That’s three times as many jobs as we have people qualified to fill them.

Kirk McDonald from Sorry, College Grads, I Probably Won't Hire You

Admittedly, I don't know who has a college degree in computer science on our team. I don't.

The truth is this: Google destroyed the RSS feed reader ecosystem with a subsidized product, stifling its competitors and killing innovation. It then neglected Google Reader itself for years, after it had effectively become the only player. Today it does further damage by buggering up the already beleaguered links between publishers and readers. It would have been better for the Internet if Reader had never been at all.

Aldo Cortesi from Google, destroyer of ecosystems

My RSS consumption was at an all-time high in the few years prior to Google Reader coming out. Once I migrated from a desktop RSS reader to Google Reader, I found myself opening it less often. Over the years, it's fallen off my radar. I only check a few times a month. Did Google kill RSS? On purpose? Accidental? Is RSS dead? Do we all need to rely on the sites we "follow" now via Facebook, Google+, and Twitter? Better? Worse? Inevitable?

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the social media marketing bubble will burst soon enough.

Dave Allen from Social media marketing affinity fraud

What do you think?

Try to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent.

Peter Bevelin from Seeking Wisdom

Phrasing your problem as a question immediately gets your mind working on solutions rather than on the pragmatics associated with the project. For example, “Find new markets for XYZ” can easily be rephrased as “How can we expose more potential customers to XYZ?”

Todd Henry from The Accidental Creative: How to Be Brilliant at a Moment's Notice

Rephrasing problems into questions (that have a clear objective) can have a drastic impact on the conversation we're having.

“I have a four-year-old daughter and I want her to think that anything is possible, that no career in out of bounds,” she says. “If any other comparable industry had a female workforce of only 17% there would be an outcry.”

Belinda Parmar, Lady Geek from Why are so few women working in technology?

Enjoyed this article... but got a chuckle from, ""Developers tend to be good, straightforward sorts with a refreshing lack of ego, who genuinely enjoy collaborating."

If you have always done it that way, it’s probably wrong.

Charles Kettering from

You do not merely want to be considered just the best of the best. You want to be considered the only ones who do what you do.

Jerry Garcia, The Grateful Dead from

First order business is getting all of our content on mobile, in a format that’s readable, navigable, and searchable. Someone called me out recently for calling that “content strategy,” suggesting that making that happen isn’t really a “strategy.” You know what? It’s not. It’s tactical, it’s wonky, and it’s hard work. It’s also our most important job.


If I could prioritize the efforts of our community over the next 3-5 years, I’d spend 80% of our efforts on the problem of cleaning up our desktop content and getting it all (at least, all the good stuff) onto mobile. Let’s use our 20% experimental time to explore how to prioritize content differently based on what we think we can intuit about user intention based on device and location. And let’s give each of those problems the appropriate weight in our discussions.

Karen McGrane, Bond Art + Science from Mobile > Local

It’s a hard, simple calculus: Run until you can’t run anymore. Then run some more. Find a new source of energy and will. Then run even faster.

Scott Jurek from Eat and Run: My Unlikely Journey to Ultramarathon Greatness

This reminded me of a time when Gary and I were running near the waterfront in downtown Portland. He said something along the lines of that when I get towards the top of a incline that I should push myself even harder. He had some explanation that involved how our bodies burn energy, use oxygen, etc... I don't recall the specifics.

Anyhow, a few years later, I recall this conversation each time I find myself overcoming the hardest part of a challenge. Below the surface... and a few layers below that, there is always more energy inside of me... yearning to be burned.

The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs.

Alan Kay from Interview with Alan Kay

Empathy – and realizing that the other person is actually a whole separate person, not an actor in your own production of Me: The Play! – is the core thing in every human communication difficulty.

Amy Hoy from Amy replies to "Levels of aspiration"

but... but... as far as I can see, the world revolves around me.

The Portland area has emerged as a leading center of mobile-application development, a field Apple essentially created with its iPhone and iPad. A recent study credited the app development industry with about 6,000 local jobs.

Zach Dundas and Will Lambeth from iOregon, Portland Monthly

Even I was a bit surprised to read these numbers. There's heavy competition in Portland!

17% of cell phone owners do most of their online browsing on their phone.

Key Findings from Pew Research Cell Internet Use report

Crazy! A bit more math and we can determine, since 88% of U.S. adults own a cell phone, that 15% of American adults are using their phones, more than any other device, to browse the web. 88% is a significant increase even since April, when I pegged that same statistic at 83% in my Mobile Web Statistics article. This percentage is even larger for young Americans- 45% of 18-29 year olds who access the internet on their phones, compared with 31% for adults in general, use their phones for the majority of their web browsing. What does this mean? For web professionals, mobile should most definitely not be an afterthought. Yes, many people are using their phones as an additional web-capable device but, as these numbers reveal, tons of Americans are using their phones as their primary internet device. The landscape is changing- whether we're ready or not.

We try not to spend money on things that don’t matter to customers. Frugality breeds resourcefulness, self-sufficiency and invention. There are no extra points for headcount, budget size or fixed expense.

Amazon from Amazon Leadership Principles

Some food for thought.

Programmer Robby Russell began exploring the framework just over a year ago. Within weeks, he was hooked and evangelical; he launched a crusading blog, “Robby on Rails,” and realigned his consultancy, Portland, Ore.-based Planet Argon, to work exclusively on Rails development and hosting.

Stacy Cowley, CRN from Riding The Ruby Rails In A New Direction

It's crazy to think that this was written over six years ago.

Ultimately, the organization’s instinct is to protect the ground that’s already been taken rather than take new ground. Every organization begins as an advance force and ends up as an occupying force.

Todd Henry from The Accidental Creative

Beyond the baseline demographic data of age, race, sex, location etc, we should ponder some questions: Who are they? How are they? How well do they sleep? Are they anxious? Are they extroverts displaying their digital peacock feathers? Are they introverts who can socialize but head home early because their feet hurt and they’d rather read a book? Are 52% of them introverts who live voyeuristically through the safety of glowing screens? What is it that they want? Can we provide for them? Do we have to?

Dave Allen, director, interactive strategy for NORTH from Memorial Day musings: Facebook, Bob Dylan, Paul Krugman and introverts

It sounds like Dave had a lovely weekend down in Palm Springs and busted out this thought-provoking post about Facebook's recent IPO and what they are likely going to need to focus on as a business... while raising a lot of good questions for us all to ponder.

A survey of 11 recent Portland tech startups, ranging from companies with four employees to 80, reveals that their total workforces were typically 70 percent to 80 percent male, while their development and engineering teams—i.e., the people who write the actual code—have even fewer women. In many cases, none.

Ruth Brown from Willamette Week: Where the Tech is She?

It's good to see this issue getting more and more attention.

For any e-commerce site, I have the perfect advice on how to raise their conversion rate significantly. All they have to do is stop marketing. Once they stop marketing, the number of visitors will drop to only those who are already loyal customers.

Because those visitors are loyal, they are probably only coming to buy something. The ratio of purchasers to visitors will skyrocket. Sales will likely drop, but conversion will go sky-high.

Sounds great, right? That’s the other problem with the conversion rate ratio: it’s not at all related to the other business operations.

Jared Spool from Avoid Ratios For Metrics – Moving Beyond Conversion Rates, Part 1

Let's avoid getting too focused on conversion rates.