This week's been pretty productive on the book reading front, I quickly worked my way through Orwell's Why I Write which was fascinating, albeit the British stereotyping quickly became tiresome. I found it interesting to compare Orwell's views on British and European values and the rise of fascism across Europe - things that worryingly have been on the rise in recent years.
I first came across Yanis Varoufakis' work back when he worked at Valve, the video game company (back when they still made games) and thoroughly enjoyed the few blogs he posted there. So when I was browsing the Economics section of Waterstones I was drawn to his book, A Brief History of Capitalism. I know next to nothing in economics, so this was precisely the dumbed down view I needed to dip my toe into the subject.
I've heard and read a lot about Eric Ries' Lean Startup in the last few years, so it provided some interesting and rather light reading when I was abroad in Granada. I'm working on a lil' something something so there was a lot to take away from this, particularly around the value of quickly developing and testing an MVP, something I hope to have done by the end of the year 👀
Finally, I'm now reading Scott Galloway's The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google. More thoughts to follow next week.
Profitwell continue to bring out some of the most well-researched and produced content out there, and this piece on discounting certainly didn't disappoint.
Discounts are one of the worst tactics you can use to grow your business, because like a virus they’re a ticking time bomb for your growth.
Despite what you've read elsewhere, and what you're probably thinking, medieval people bathed, as Dr Eleanor Janega explains quite authoritatively. Not quite the smelly peasants we think about, eh?
This is something I'm sure a lot of people working in tech have come across, but what actually are product teams? Marty Cagan puts together a compelling case to explain the difference between product and feature teams.
There was a great article in the New Yorker on what modern fandom means and how it came to be. Not going to lie, superfans weird me out.
Boris is trying to fuck us. Is the ICO going to come to our rescue?
We've all come across poorly implemented browser Push notifications, but it doesn't have to be that way Stephanie Walker wrote the perfect guide on how to not fuck up push notifications. Speaking anecdotally, my team at DM Companies implemented these on one of the sites we worked on. For our use case, we saw a consistent uplift vs the same message delivered via email. This is absolutely a channel that can work dramatically well, just be responsible with it, duh.
Bit short this week huh? I spent a long weekend in Granada - the Alhambra is fucking incredible. Get your head away from your screen and go visit sometime.