Quotes

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

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

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. <br /><br /> 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 <strong>15% of American adults are using their phones, more than any other device, to browse the web</strong>. 88% is a significant increase even since April, when I pegged that same statistic at 83% in my <a href="http://blog.planetargon.com/entries/2012/4/11/mobile-web-statistics-short-and-sweet">Mobile Web Statistics article</a>. 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 <strong>primary</strong> internet device. The landscape is changing- whether we're ready or not.