Editor’s note: This interview with David Linthicum was recorded for Coding Over Cocktails — a podcast by TORO Cloud.
The cloud has changed the way enterprises provision and deploy IT. Although dealing with databases, storage, compute cycles, and other platforms that can be leveraged on-premise still have their place, the cloud has provided a new consumption model that is continuously evolving.
This week, in a move like something from a particularly eventful episode of The Office, popular project management app company Basecamp banned political and societal discussion in the company’s internal communications.
In a post that has been revised for “clarification,” the company’s co-founder Jason Fried listed six rules for employees: No societal or political discussions at work; No more ‘paternalistic’ benefits; No more committees; No more lingering on past decisions; No more 360 reviews; No forgetting what we do here.
A follow-up post from Heinemeier Hansson notes that Basecamp will still permit discussion of issues deemed central to its business like anti-trust and privacy; certain civil liberties are to be championed, while others, like racism and climate change, are not.
On the surface, it seems reasonable, Fried and co-founder David Heinemeier Hansson would like you to believe that it is. After all, people are paid to work, not soapbox, right?
So why, if they’re the ones being protected, are Basecamp’s employees angry about the move?
It turns out, multiple sources from inside Basecamp are reporting that the ‘political’ and ‘societal’ issues referred to in Fried’s public memo were, in fact, frank and open conversations about Basecamp itself.
As reported by The Verge, way back in 2009, a list of ‘funny’ customer names began circulating at the company — hardly respectful, potentially racist, and certainly inappropriate. The misalignment between co-founders and staff occurred when staff members attempted to hold discrete conversations about this and numerous other diversity and inclusivity failings at the company. Fried’s move appears to be a direct attempt to halt criticism of the status quo at Basecamp.
Basecamp itself is a highly political organization: The co-founders have written several books advocating certain societal change; they even provided a campaign headquarters and substantial donation for a candidate for Chicago mayor. Both co-founders are highly active on social media, using their business positions to elevate their personal views.
The truth is that the solo entrepreneur is an almost mythical beast. Successful startups require contributions from a range of skills and experience beyond any one individual. Jason Fried may be the frontman, strutting up and down the stage in spandex pants, with David Heinemeier Hansson playing lead guitar with his teeth, but behind them, there’s a drummer keeping time, and behind them all, there’s a crew of roadies without whom none of the equipment will arrive, let alone sound good.
Basecamp’s founders argue that the company has a mission, and that mission is to create apps that streamline the workplace. But how can you develop a product that is inclusive if staff cannot discuss what inclusive means? The answer is, you can’t.
Discussing racial bias in advertising or the impact of company wastage, climate change, or gender pay gaps in HR meetings are all political and societal and lead to a healthier, more united company.
As designers, we often say that you cannot not communicate; every decision is a design decision; there is no such thing as “adesign.” Likewise, choosing to be apolitical is itself a political choice. The only way it is feasible to run a company like this is to treat employees like robots (in the word’s original sense).
If employees feel the need to discuss exclusionary policies in the workplace, do the company founders, who benefit from those policies (or they would not be in place), have a moral or legal right to restrict those discussions?
Although it is the first point in Fried’s list that has drawn most ire, it is the fourth item on the list that is most telling: “No more lingering or dwelling on past decisions.” Like a parent answering, “Because I said so,” Fried’s attitude to his staff is laid bare in one statement.
It turns out two wealthy white men would rather their employees not try to change the world or even their workplace.
When Coinbase announced a similar move last year, it lost 5% of its staff. If Basecamp suffered the same loss, it would amount to three people. Hardly a disaster. The question for the founders — who, judging by the number of follow-ups and clarifications they’ve published, are aware the ice they’re on is perilously thin — is whether this kind of controversy creates irreparable reputational damage.
Featured image via Pexels.
The post Poll: Is Basecamp Right To Shutdown Politics At Work? first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
“Cette initiative est née de notre profonde conviction que les entreprises, quelle que soit l’industrie, peuvent tirer parti du partage d’experiences.”
Il est ingénieur de formation, issu de Polytech’Nice-Sophia. Elle est diplômée en mathématiques appliquées et a validé une thèse en théorie de l’optimisation. Ils mènent leur carrière dans de grandes entreprises technologiques internationales. Et dirigent le Industrial Council of Artificial Intelligence Research (ICAIR). Olena Kushakovska (SAP) et Jean-Michel Sauvage (Amadeus) pilotent ensemble ICAIR depuis 2020. Ils ont une ambition claire pour l’organisation : accélérer le travail sur l’IA en mettant l’accent sur le développement durable. A l’occasion du 1er SAP Sustainability Summit, la directrice générale de SAP Labs France et le directeur R&D pour les solutions Revenue Management d’Amadeus se sont prêtés au jeu de l’interview croisée pour nous donner leur vision de l’IA durable.
Olena Kushakovska : Chez SAP, nous permettons à nos clients de devenir des entreprises intelligentes, d’utiliser les données pour bâtir des entreprises plus performantes, plus résilientes, plus rentables, plus agiles et plus durables. Nous mettons tout en œuvre pour que la réalité de l’entreprise intelligente soit pleinement intégrée avec les fonctionnalités d’Intelligence Artificielle.
Jean-Michel Sauvage : L’IA est une technologie majeure qui offre la meilleure utilisation possible des données et fournit un service plus performant, plus efficace, prévisible, personnalisé et à plus forte valeur ajoutée sur l’ensemble de la chaîne.
Olena : Amadeus et SAP sont membres fondateurs de ICAIR. La décision d’aller de l’avant a été prise entre Gilles Floyrac et moi il y a environ 2 ans. Gilles était le président d’Amadeus Nice à l’époque et la région Côte d’Azur venait de décrocher le label 3IA. Son idée était que les entreprises conduisent l’agenda industriel parallèlement au monde universitaire. Plus de 60 entreprises de la zone ont soutenu le projet 3IA. Nous avons contacté les entreprises que nous pensions intéressées (ex. IBM, ARM, NXP, Thales Alenia Space, Orange) et le “Club” est né. La réunion de mise en place entre les responsables de site pour sceller le club s’est tenue chez Amadeus puis la 1ère session de travail a eu lieu chez SAP en juin 2019.
Jean-Michel : Les techniques d’IA n’étant pas spécifiques à la résolution d’un problème, cette initiative est motivée par la forte conviction que les entreprises, même lorsqu’elles travaillent dans différents secteurs, peuvent bénéficier de l’apprentissage et du partage d’expériences sur les défis auxquels elles sont confrontées sur des problèmes techniques similaires.
« Nous nous efforçons d’utiliser l’IA de manière durable et d’atteindre les objectifs de durabilité de l’ONU au sein du secteur. » Olena KUSHAKOVSKA
Jean-Michel : ICAIR se concentre sur la recherche appliquée, et à ce titre, est un moyen de lier la recherche fondamentale et les résultats académiques à leur application dans un environnement industriel.
Olena : ICAIR est à taille humaine, agile, diversifié, industriel, pratico-pratique, avec des cas d’utilisation réels. Des entreprises leaders dans le monde composent le conseil. Pour autant, il y a un faible niveau d’administration, une faible bureaucratie, mais beaucoup de bonne volonté et un grand écosystème. La bienveillance et le soutien sont sans faille, et l’implication continue !
Jean-Michel : L’IA s’accompagne de défis, tant en termes de technologie, de puissance de calcul, que de biais d’apprentissage, ou de décisions humainement explicables. Nous pensons que l’IA peut être conçue et utilisée de manière durable et apporter de la valeur d’une manière qui respecte la planète et les communautés.
Olena : On questionne souvent l’IA en termes écologique ou éthique. Nous voulons envisager la durabilité dans un contexte beaucoup plus large, celui des objectifs de durabilité des Nations Unies. La durabilité s’entend comme la capacité de notre génération à atteindre ses objectifs, sans compromettre la capacité de la génération future à atteindre les leurs. Et ce, par rapport à toutes les ressources : naturelles, humaines, économiques. Nos efforts se concentrent sur l’IA durable pour atteindre les objectifs des Nations Unies au sein de l’industrie.
Jean-Michel : ICAIR a été pensé de telle sorte que des chercheurs d’entreprises de Sophia Antipolis hébergeant des laboratoires de recherche travaillant dans différents contextes industriels, et sur différents sujets, puissent discuter et échanger leurs points de vue sur des questions communes liées à l’utilisation de l’IA dans leurs industries respectives.
Olena : Notre objectif est de travailler sur des projets communs et d’échanger sur les meilleures pratiques en matière d’apprentissage automatique et d’intelligence artificielle. Cela permettra de faire progresser les recherches en matière d’IA. Enfin, nous comptons utiliser notre puissance commune pour promouvoir la Côte d’Azur en tant que berceau de l’IA durable.
Olena : Ma volonté est de promouvoir notre grande collaboration, dans l’écosystème incroyablement riche sur le plan technologique et intellectuel de la Côte d’Azur, en montrant à nos maisons-mères que cet endroit est vraiment exceptionnel, et y développer une véritable communauté autour de l’IA. Je veux aussi que la France et l’Europe obtiennent la place qu’elles méritent dans le monde en ce qui concerne l’IA, en veillant à ce que l’IA soit utilisée à bon escient, que la Côte d’Azur soit identifiée comme l’endroit idéal pour l’IA durable, et enfin que les gens ne craignent plus l’IA.
Jean-Michel : Je suis un passionné d’aviation et d’informatique. Heureusement pour moi, les voyages et l’aviation en particulier sont des domaines pleins de défis combinatoires, très complexes à résoudre et à optimiser. Chez Amadeus, nous sommes déjà pleinement engagés dans le déploiement de l’IA. Nous sommes également engagés depuis de nombreuses années dans le développement de systèmes ouverts et interopérables, car nous pensons que c’est en combinant les meilleurs services « atomiques » que nous apporterons une plus grande valeur ajoutée à nos clients, à l’industrie du voyage et aux voyageurs. Mais nous savons aussi que, comme toute évolution de ce genre, elle a besoin de temps, d’expérience, de tests et d’apprentissage. L’IA s’accompagne de nombreuses questions et défis sans réponse. Avec ICAIR, nous faisons partie de l’apprentissage, de l’enseignement, et nous voulons y répondre de la bonne manière.
Les membres sont des entreprises internationales avec des sites sur la Côte d’Azur et menant des recherches en IA :
Le programme touche l’ensemble de l’écosystème du label 3IA de la Côte d’Azur :
Des initiatives liées à l’IA lancées par ces acteurs soutiennent la dynamique territoriale de la Côte d’Azur. Elles se rapportent aux objectifs de développement durable des Nations unies et constituent le champ d’application du programme « IA durable ».
En savoir plus : ICAIR – Industrial Council of Artificial Intelligence Research
The post SAP et Amadeus pilotent le conseil industriel pour la recherche en intelligence artificielle appeared first on SAP France News.
Landing pages are central to successful marketing campaigns; they allow you to target particular customers with particular solutions to particular problems.
It’s easy to confuse what a landing page is because users “land” on many pages. When we talk about landing pages, we mean a page that is entirely dedicated to a particular type of customer. In fact, if we could create a unique landing page for each individual user, that would be awesome.
You might think your homepage is a landing page, but it’s not; users reach your landing page in various ways — directly, via organic search, or backlink. A landing page is normally dedicated to a specific marketing campaign. It is accessed from a link in an email, via social media, or most often via a PPC (Pay Per Click) advert.
Here are 10 elements of landing pages that are proven to convert successfully:
Your potential customers must know how to move forward with your product or service as early in the experience as possible.
Are they signing up for a free trial? Are they signing up for your newsletter? Are they buying a product? Are they contacting you? Whatever you need them to do, make it clear.
The Hick-Hyman law of UX says the more choices you give a user, the less likely they are to make any choice at all; conversely, the fewer choices, the greater the likelihood that they’ll move forward.
Give the user one choice: click the button, or don’t click the button. A single CTA will out-perform multiple options.
Often, your landing page will need a potential customer’s information. They might be creating an account, setting up a trial, or just joining your newsletter.
If the potential customer is signing up for a trial, by all means, ask for their email address. But you don’t need their cell number, their mother’s name, the street they grew up on, their birthday, or any of that other junk that’s used to profile users.
Whatever the purpose, keep your form ultra-simple. That means as few fields as possible. If you really want it, give the user the option to fill it in later as part of an onboarding process — when they’re already invested — but not on the landing page.
The first thing your potential customer sees on your landing page is the headline, so make it count.
Half a dozen words are usually more than enough. Your goal is to keep it short enough that the potential customer has read the headline before they realize it.
Often, you’ll want to clarify the statement with more information. That’s fine as a sub-heading after you’ve grabbed their interest, but make sure you grab their attention first.
The headline “Coyote Anvils” is best followed by the sub-heading “You’ll be eating roadrunner for dinner!”
Your goal for your headline is to explain your product or service in 2–3 seconds.
What makes your product or service stand out? What makes it better than the competition? If you’re not sure, spend some time checking out companies in your space.
Creating a value proposition can be one of the toughest challenges a business faces because you need to put yourself in your potential customer’s shoes. But if you get this right, it will carry your marketing. You need to find the benefits within your product or service, not the features.
Value propositions are best when backed by facts. The “World’s Most Accurate Anvils” is best backed by proof: “9/10 coyotes said they were more likely to hit their target than themselves when using our patented AccuAnvil.”
You’ve got seconds to engage your potential customer, perhaps even less. One way to grab them is with a great headline, but you have to keep them interested beyond the headline.
One great way is bullet lists with short entries. Short-item lists naturally pull our eyes down the page because our eyes take in the whole line in one glance; we don’t need to read to absorb the information.
The longer you can keep someone on the page, the greater the likelihood they’ll keep looking, so pulling them down the page with lists is a great tactic.
The Zeigarnik Effect says that people remember incomplete experiences better than they do completed ones. This is because when a task is seen as completed, it can be filed away as a memory, but if it’s incomplete, then it remains at the front of your mind.
This is a boon for designers creating landing pages because we can create a situation where the potential customer begins an onboarding process and is aware that it hasn’t been completed — they might need to verify their email address, for example.
The lack of completion keeps the landing page and the product or service fresh in the potential customer’s mind. So when they see that onboarding email, they’ll use it.
Anyone can put up a website. It’s easy. And as a result, potential customers don’t necessarily trust you.
One way you can combat this is with some form of proof. That may be in the form of official certifications, or featured testimonials, or just independent reviews.
It rarely occurs to potential customers that you’re cherry-picking the testimonials and reviews you’re choosing to display, so even if only some of your reviews are good, it’s worth including them.
But be careful not to sound too good. If you post nothing but 5* reviews, people will smell a rat; that 3* review may actually do you a favor by making the 5*s seem more genuine.
Potential customers lack imagination, they don’t have all the facts, and unless your product or service is very basic, they may not fully understand what the product does for them.
Use images to quickly show them what life may be like using your product or service. Paint an appealing picture. If they can see themselves in the image, they’ll grant you a little more time to persuade them in the form of further content.
How did the potential customer arrive at your landing page? Chances are it was via a PPC link, or if you were lucky an organic search link. However they arrived, they were in a certain frame of mind, with a certain problem they wanted to solve; they aren’t going to take kindly to being diverted onto a different train of thought.
Your landing page has to match the tone, style, and value proposition of your adverts. The potential customer’s experience of your organization begins with the advert, not the landing page, so make sure that you don’t break the spell. If your landing page doesn’t match your advert, you could lose the potential customer altogether — and increase your bounce rate while you’re at it.
Remember: the customer was attracted by something in your advert, so give them the same attractive qualities on your landing page.
Most sites have a single main menu and a rich footer with links to customer service, contact pages, and so forth. These are detrimental on a landing page because you’ll leak traffic to other, less-focused parts of your site.
Your landing page is a streamlined selling machine. The only link you want on the page is your CTA.
It’s fine to keep legal text and even links to privacy policies — users rarely click those anyway. You can also link to your homepage using your logo. But don’t add any navigation that invites a click, or you’ll dilute all the work you’ve put in.
The post 10 Elements of Landing Pages That Convert first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
When building integration components, it’s almost a given that we will have to process data in different formats like JSON, XML, YAML, etc. It’s imperative that any integration product should have very good support for handling these data formats. This kind of robust support for handling data in different formats makes the product flexible to be adapted to different use cases.
In this article, we will look into the support provided by Kumologica for handling the data in these different formats.
Helm is a popular package manager choice for Kubernetes. Installation of software, managing versions, upgrading versions, and finding charts from the registry are key benefits of Helm.
EnRoute helm chart installs the EnRoute Ingress Controller and provides easy configuration options to define policy for a service. The helm chart provides fine-grained control to define L7 policies with its ability to enable/disable plugins for a service using configuration options that can be specified when the helm is invoked.
This month’s collection contains a combination of big and bold, and clean and minimal. Although basic minimalism is still trendy, with lots of white space and greyscale type, we are seeing it softened with color. This is implemented differently, ranging from hints of off-whites in images to gentle pastels as section backgrounds.
Playing around with type and using typefaces with a few characteristic quirks is another way minimalism is being tempered without negating the overall effect. Plus, we’ve got some strong examples of type rules being deliberately broken to good effect. Enjoy!
The new website for seafood company Crusta C makes clever use of the company’s simple logo mark ‘C’ with a cutout video effect.
How Many Plants is a guide to house plants and how to look after them. A good combination of illustration and space gives a friendly but efficient feel.
Out of the Valley, make bespoke and prefabricated cabins focusing on natural materials and traditional craft. The subtle changes in background color add warmth to the minimal layout.
Portfolio site for photographer Saskia Wilson. This is absolute simplicity, with a clear grid and nice, bold type to bare minimum text.
Design studio Made Thought has some pretty prestigious clients; for a designer, it doesn’t get more prestigious than creating a new brand identity for MoMA. Their bold aesthetic and approach explain their success.
For-fun sites like The Great Lake are a great way for web creatives to show their skills. This one from designer and front-end developer Anna Sherruble is visually appealing and has some informative content.
Architects Acayaba + Rosenberg use carefully curated photography and subtle scrolling animation to pull the user in and create a pleasing browsing experience.
Soft colors and a well-ordered grid recreate the feel of a mood board that prevents this site for Omexco from appearing cluttered and overly busy while showcasing multiple products.
For his own site, digital creator Johan Belin has opted to show off his skills by creating this single-page site instead of simply showing work. This can be a risky tactic, but it works here.
A combination of contrasting and complementary color combinations creates freshness in this site for digital agency La Nouvelle.
Found Studio’s website uses a very basic grid layout to allow the work to stand out; varying the typeface, weight, and style within sections of text creates individuality.
CKMS is a design and build company. Their site is minimal but with a few nice little touches, like the background color change button in the bottom right corner.
Slow is a collective of people–largely artists, designers, artisans–aiming to implement and live by the slow movement principles. The design of their site reflects these aims, creating a sense of calm and deliberation.
Practical information for visiting the Anne Frank House and museum is combined with historical information and educational resources in this thoughtfully structured and visually engaging site.
Runway is a platform for publishing open-source, pre-trained machine learning models, as well as for training your own models aimed at artists and filmmakers. If this site aims to make the user want to try Runway, it succeeds.
Fat Free video branding agency add warmth to their minimal site with soft color and occasional illustration.
The furniture and other interior products produced by Pinch Design aim for a quiet, elegant aesthetic, and their website reflects that with pale grey and generous spacing.
Digital studio Sentempo manages to achieve glossy without being overdone. The star dividers are a nice detail.
Many companies, including creative agencies, have come up with ‘what we did/achieved in the last year’ microsites. This one from Context Creative succeeds as a good advert for them.
This single-page intro to GT Super font has a certain drama in keeping with the font itself and allows you to play around with the size, weight, and style of the font in most sections of the text.
The post 20 Best New Websites, April 2021 first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
The formula is the heart of an Excel file. And of course, we all want to do correct calculations and deliver accurate results. When there is something wrong, we want to trace back to those referenced cells to find the root cause. Excel natively has a built-in convenient formula dependent/precedent trace feature, it highlights the dependent/precedent cells and displays arrows to indicate the relationships. This helps users to trace back and find any error formulas easily.
Now, when bringing the spreadsheet online, we can do more. We can display the relationships in a custom way that is most useful according to the application context, or bring them to a different service or application for doing the validation programmatically.
Every day design fans submit incredible industry stories to our sister-site, Webdesigner News. Our colleagues sift through it, selecting the very best stories from the design, UX, tech, and development worlds and posting them live on the site.
The best way to keep up with the most important stories for web professionals is to subscribe to Webdesigner News or check out the site regularly. However, in case you missed a day this week, here’s a handy compilation of the top curated stories from the last seven days. Enjoy!
The post Popular Design News Of The Week: April 19, 2021 – April 25, 2021 first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
You might be wondering why I am including so many BI/Visualization platforms when talking about potential alternatives to SQL. After all, these tools are only set up to address an organization’s reporting needs, which constitute only one of the use cases for data queries and SQL. This is certainly a valid point, so allow me to clarify my reasoning a bit more.
While it is true that reporting is only one of many potential uses for SQL, it is nevertheless an extremely important one. There is a good reason why there are so many No-Code BI tools in the market—to address heightening demand from enterprises around the world — and therefore, it is worth taking a closer look at their almost inevitable shortcomings.
