Jonah Lehrer: The Origins of Creative Insight & Why You Need Grit

 

Jonah Lehrer: The Origins of Creative Insight & Why You Need Grit from 99U on Vimeo.

Awesome talk about creativity

On Pursue a Dream.

‎"Dreams do come true, but first we must pick the right ones" Be honest about your limitations.

Time will prove everything. Pursue dreams that not bore you, even after thousands of hours. Do the thing you love, love is just another name for "it never gets old".

http://t.co/SBZY2mWu

On Hitting the wall.

When you hit a wall while fixing a problem, focusing in the problem would be a waste of mental resources, the most productive thing you can do is forget about work. But if you have the feeling that you are getting closer you should continue with full charge.

http://vimeo.com/45162748#t=1526

On Cities and creativity

Awesome comperation between Cities and Companies. The difference between them, and why cities make us more productives and companies restrain our creativities .

http://vimeo.com/45162748#t=1737

"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.

Random notes on Pragmatic Thinking and Learning.

Recently I was cleaning up my desk and found some of my notes on the book Pragmatic Thinking and Learning. Although the notes lack structure I found them inspiring.

On Being Happy

• Notice how long it takes you to get over your initial reaction to a perceived threat. How does your reaction change once you “think about it”?
• Act on that impulse but not immediately. Plan for it; schedule it. Does it still make sense later?
• Write a new movie. If you’re troubled by a given film that keeps replaying in your head, sit down and craft a new one—this time with a happy ending.

On Testing Yourself

When you are dead solid convinced of something, ask yourself why. You’re sure the boss is out to get you. How do you know? Everybody is using Java for this kind of application. Says who? You’re awful developer. Compared to whom?

Quotes

The mind is its own place and, in itself, can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven. — John Milton, Paradise Lost.

The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas-covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be. - Douglas Adams

It is by logic we prove; it is by intuition we discover. - Henri Poincarégreat

The goal.

Yesterday, someone reminded me  the Goal from studying the book "Structure and Implementation of computer programs".

They should feel secure about modifying a program, retaining the spirit and style of the original author. - Alan Jay Perlis talking about the goal of completing the SICP book.

http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-7.html#%_chap_Temp_4

How and how-not to build a product - Kathy Sierra Keynote at 2009 NMC Summer Conference

Recently I saw for the hundred time the keynote from Kathy Sierra. It's feels good to see that even though I did not think on her presentation while working, her teachings still resonate on my mind.

Here are my notes on this presentation:

It’s not about how cool you are... or how cool its your product... It’s about How cool you make the user of your product , what cool things they can do now they use your product....

How you make them feel about themselves drives how they feel about YOU

1. Don't build a better X Build a better user of X. Not how do we build a better camera its how we build a better photographer.
2. Give them super power QUICK! User must do something cool within 30 min!
3. Making them Smarter. Anything you can do to make them BETTER
4. Do not ask about X ask about the subset of X. If you sell kitchen appliances, Do not blog about kitchen appliances, blog about cooking.
5. Shrink the 10 000 hours to master something! Show the patterns and shorten the duration of the 10000 hours.Nobody become passionate about something they suck at...make the user an expert more quickly on your system.....
6. Make your product reflect their feelings.“How you make them feel about themselves drives how they feel about YOU”
7. Make the right thing easy, wrong thing difficult. This one applies for everything