Is Your Freemium Strategy Harming Your App’s UX?

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The word “free” is often music to our ears. Free trial, free download, free music, we will take it all as long as there are no strings attached. This tangled web of strings, however, is what brings out the skeptic in us, and we start to believe that nothing is free.

Mobile app strategies left free trials in the dust and created a new tactic: the freemium. A crossbreed of “free” and “premium”, the freemium tactic encompasses (you guessed it) both free and premium services. This may seem like a great idea at first, but lest we remember: there is no such thing as a free lunch. Not to mention, freemiums can also damage your mobile app’s UX.Image title

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My Job Search Checklist

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Not too long after I started my career, in the 1990s, I found myself on the other side of the interview table. Part of my responsibilities were to evaluate and interview candidates for the summer internships. This was quite an interesting challenge for me, since I was sitting on the other side of the interview table just months before I was given the task.

Over the last twenty-seven years, I have been involved with the new hire process — scanning through piles of resumes, interviewing candidates and even making the decision on who to hire and to not hire for a given position. During this time, I have built my own top-ten list of things to keep in mind when submitting your credentials for an open opportunity.

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Phases of Self-Organized Team

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A self-organized team is a utopian state where every Agile Coach or Scrum Masters strives to bring their Agile team. This transformation will not happen in a day or two, but it will require months to years, depending on the organization’s alignment and priority in adopting Agile. It requires constant coaching from the Scrum Masters/Agile Coaches with periodic inspection and adaption into the team. This article is mainly about understanding the changes happening in a team while transforming into a self-organized team. The identification of these phases will enable the Scrum Masters/Agile Coaches to shift their focus areas accordingly.

The transformation happens on a phase-by-phase basis. And below are the identified phases as part of the real-time experience.

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Paying Off Technical Debt: Why You Shouldn’t Go Live With POC Code

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Let’s face it. You have debt, I have debt, the entire tech world is built on technical debt. What’s the worse thing that can happen when all of our software is built off a pile of technical debt? Well, would you drive on an overpass built with the modeling clay that was used to green light that project? Yeah, didn’t think so. In the beginning stages of building a product, it’s easier to cut corners and make quick decisions. No one sits there and says to their investors, "We understand you want a quick return on the nice big check you wrote, but we are trying to figure out if the platform should be made using blockchain or Rails 5." (Yes, I know those are VASTLY different things, work with me here).

CAST Software found the average per-line cost of technical debt to be $3.61, and for Java code, a staggering $5.42. Interesting Forbes Article

You want to build a platform, go to market quickly and get that sweet, sweet validation that users actually want what you built. I’m not here to kill your dreams or to tell you to move slowly. After all the tech industry is famous for "fail fast." What I want to suggest is that as soon as you go to market with viable product, start thinking through those long-term consequences. That time you choose X, when you really knew Y would have been a better long-term solution. Do you have time to clean up that 53 line function in your Android app? Can that unit test use a few more, obvious, edge cases? You and I both know the resounding answer is: "YES!"

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Bring a New Tool to Your Team (and Not Get Squashed in The Process): 5 Tips for Successful Adoption

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Bringing any new tool into an organization can feel like an uphill battle. It’s difficult to overcome inertia, even with the promise of improved workflows and happier teammates. Any change is hard, harder still when colleagues have grown attached to "the way we’ve always done things." How can you get your team to see the light when you know there’s a better way?

We’ve spoken to many individuals over the years who have successfully brought CircleCI into their organizations, so we’ve asked them what tips they had for others working to adopt a new tool.

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Interview with Colin Breck: “I Still Don’t Know What I Want to Do When I Grow Up.”

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Colin Breck does not need much introduction. With two decades of experience in developing fast-data infrastructures for the monitoring and control of industrial applications, Colin is currently with Tesla working on distributed systems for the monitoring, aggregation, and control of distributed, renewable-energy assets.

At Reactive Summit in Montreal, Colin is doing a talk “From Fast-Data to a Key Operational Technology for the Enterprise” on October 24th. We’re barely containing our excitement for Colin’s talk, so we asked him a few questions about his professional journey, the challenges companies deploying Reactive face and the solution to these challenges.

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Agile Adoption and the Survival of the Fittest

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We are living in 21st century and have evolved a lot, from transportation, communication, entertainment and everything which is around us today. We all might have read Darwin’s theory of evolution. The gist of this theory is the humans are the most adaptable species among all due to which it survived all the calamities of nature. The process of adaptation is still in progress. Darwin has rightly stated, “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.”

Today humans are living in every corner of the globe in varied rigid climatic conditions. Some regions are too hot and some are too cold for survival, but humans have adapted those conditions for their need to survive. As time passed, new things evolved and humans adapted everything for their survival and evolved as the strongest.

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Should a Distributed Company Hold All-Team Meetings?

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I’ve spent a significant portion of my career working in companies that are at least partially remote/distributed. One of them was globally distributed, with no central headquarters at all. Everyone worked from their homes. When I founded VividCortex, I wanted to blend the best of both worlds, and to my credit, some of what I did has been an improvement. There are still downsides, though, and in this post, I want to explore how distributed teams can address a basic human need: seeing each other in-person.

I have a lot more thoughts about many aspects of remote/distributed work and the culture that develops with them, which I hope I can share in other blog posts someday when I get time. If you’re curious about whether I think remote/distributed teams have advantages, and whether being in an office has advantages, and whether the first or the second one is better, and whether people with clear and universal answers are wrong, the answers are "Yes, yes, yes, and yes." Beyond that, I will not go in this post, because I want to focus on the topic.

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The True Agile Is Value Delivery That Never Stops

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Software can be shipped by deadlines. In that case, it has some value that does not grow over time. To make the app great, it must be continuously upgraded. This is what true Agile is about.

"The Definition of Done" is a complex problem for many software development companies. How do you know when there are enough features? Is it worth the time to implement a functionality nobody might ever use? How do you know if we develop a thing the end users will adore? Do we stop at MVP or should we continue to work on the product?

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5 Things to Do When Your Team Is Under Pressure

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We all deal with stressful situations at work.

These are the times teamwork comes to the fore. Will you band together and figure it out? Or freak out and fall apart?

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