D&T Issue 1 [13-May-2020]
A-Z of AI, Wannacry, Usability Test and ISS Docking Simulator
When every app broke down. Open-source tech and what could go wrong.
Who makes our apps? Can we trust the sources? Here’s a fascinating insight into the pitfalls of not quite understanding the little parts that make up your product — a scenario more common than ever before with the prevalence of Free & Open Source Software (FOSS). This story explains how very recently dozens of flagship apps from companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft, Spotify, etc went down and kept crashing for about an hour — all because of a tiny bug inside a common login library originating at Facebook, used by a majority of apps we use every day. A minor config on one Fb server brought down a multitude of cascading services and products. This story is a siren-call for product and product-adjacent teams to truly understand how their products get built.
-The author is Anil Dash, CEO of Glitch, a community of Developers.
You don’t need more than 5 users to properly test your product. 🤷♂️
NN Group
One of the most trusted sources of usability theories and studies, the Neilsen Norman group has mathematically established the efficiency propagation of the number of users in a usability test. Tom Landaeur and Jacob Neilsen were able to quantify mathematically the asymptotic relation between the the number of users in a study and the mistakes found. This further dives into the nuances of iterative design, and when exactly you need more users to test with.
The A-Z of AI
Here’s a simple introduction to some of the concepts behind artificial intelligence, some fresh and some deeply entrenched. Arranged as an alphabetic collection of concepts it offers byte sized explainers for each of these and serves as a quick primer.
Can you spot wrongly done Interfaces?
A super cool bunch of quick questions that help you scrutinize design elements as a designer. You will be given two units to compare and point which one looks correctly designed. Do you have the eye for it? We got some solid scores.
The Hacker who Saved the Internet and was arrested soon after.
You might recall the news last year when a mysterious piece of Malware took down various different units of Maersk resulting them to lose hundreds of billions within a matter of weeks. This affected many others operating on Windows machines as well. Here is 23 year old, Marcus Hutchins who single handedly saved the internet by finding the vulnerability behind the malware, WannaCry, made a hero for it and then arrested by the FBI for it.
Wired Magazine
Online Town : Gather Online in Spaces
Here’s a cool little find during these extreme video calling times. Private spaces although, not a new concept on the internet, has been well utilized in this product to support virtual gatherings and parallel conversations. Online Town fades each user’s audio and video based on how far they are from each other.
Docking onto the ISS
Here’s an online simulator of the actual interface that NASA pilots use to dock SpaceX’s Dragon2 onto the ISS. It looks very cool and feels out of the world. Give it a spin. Also, btw, here’s an associated video.
Do write back to me with feedback on what you’d want to know about more often. We have a lot of readers among us in our teams, and we’d love for you to benefit from our shared knowledge pool as well!
