"A happy grain of sand" - UX is part of your job as a developer

“If you are a developer you are a designer, you affect how people feel about the product you are building, the sooner you realize that the better” - Aral Balkan at NDC2012 - Opening and Keynote "A happy grain of sand" http://vimeo.com/43524962

Aral delivered a great keynote about User Experience Design - you can see it here. Warning: he sang in the first minutes you may want to skip that part. One interesting point that he made it’s that the vision for simplicity must come from the higher level, from CEO to dev, but that everyone must guard the vision.

He said that:

“Great design is a symptom of a design-lead organization structure and development process” - Aral Balkan

And this is why apple won't need Steve, because the focus on user experience is now embedded in the organization structure.

I have extracted some more nice quotes:

“Proximity implies relation, out of sight out of mind” - Aral Balkan

“Your app shouldn’t look like your database just threw up”- Aral Balkan

“Focus on deliver quality not quantity”- Aral Balkan

“Great Design is about saying “NO” way more than “YES””- Aral Balkan

“Focus on your user needs, not your own”- Aral Balkan

“Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add but when there is nothing left to take away” -Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Head First Data Analysis - Regression: Prediction using Clojure

I’ve been reading the excellent book from the Head First Series: Head First Data Analysis. The chapter on regression contains a problem been solved in the book using R. I have translated the solution to clojure using Incanter.

The problem is pretty simple. We have a dataset that contains information about the raises given to employees, the raise requested, if they negotiated the raise, the gender and the year. People want to know what to ask for. And they want to know what they’ll get, given what they’ve asked for. And the regression line predicts what raises people will receive.

Here is the plot with the data points, each data point is a person that negotiated their salary. In the X-axis is how much they requested for a raised and in the Y-axis how much they received. And in Blue is the Regression Line.

Here is the code:

TEDxUFM - Luke Williams: Ideas are the Recipes

TEDxUFM - Luke Williams: Ideas are the Recipes

Great presentation on disruptive innovation. Highly recommended. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_innovation

Also if you are looking into becoming a better presenter, you can learn from this presentation. Notice the following:

• "What it is?" VS "What it could be?" Slides/
Theme
• Driving attention by changing size/font
• A call to action at the end of the presentation.