This is a bi-weekly newsletter of interesting stuff in business, design, and tech.
A quick note from us: We want our little corner of the internet to keep our community inspired and connected. So we want to ensure that we're only delivering content that you actually want to read. If there is something you’d like more of, things we could be doing better, or you just to chat then get in touch with lauren@eli5.io
💼 Business
“Enterprise software solutions are a messy game, we can do better”. Our founder, Wes, thinks the world of corporate digital innovation is stuck in an impasse created by risk-averse bureaucracy and greed. But, times are changing. Link.
How to use reasoning from first principles to break a problem down to its essence, digging deeper until you find the very foundation of a problem. This allows you to create better, and more innovative, solutions for your problem. Link.
We've recently read The E-Myth Revisited. Based around the franchise prototype (systemising so the business could easily be replicated multiple times), this book is about getting your business to run without you. The E-Myth (entrepreneurial myth) is that businesses are started by entrepreneurs looking to make a profit. But in reality, most are started by technicians (employees) who want to work for themselves. The problem is they know the technical, but not the business side of what they do, or how to manage people. The author believes a business needs 3 personalities and, to succeed, you must play each role: Technician, Entrepreneur, and Manager. Link.
✏️ Design
Do you care about spacing? Of course you do! Do you use Figma? Probably. Would you prefer not to keep nudging components pixel by pixel, or have to continuously check the bottom or in-between space for a previous component, or have to keep tweaking everything in a series of frames just because you changed the size of one single component? Then this is the article for you. Link.
Toy Faces is a diverse library of 3D avatars for design mock-ups. Link.
Hoverify makes inspecting, editing, copying HTML and CSS easy by just hovering over the element. It also includes various tools which let you hide and remove elements, search, pick colours, and capture screenshots. Link.
🖥️ Technology
How to convert Vue graphs (dynamic Javascript) to a render that can be used inside a PDF using Browsershot. This way you can leverage frontend components to generate a static image using dynamic data. Link.
Now you can get an AI that helps you to code. Just like autocorrect in messaging or autocomplete for your search engine - Codota completes lines of code and should make development more productive and less error-prone. Link.
How we keep up-to-date on all things Javascript. Link.
🕹️ Cool stuff
The War on Sensemaking with Daniel Schmachtenberger explores how hard it is to validate truthfulness (and generally make sense of everything) in an information ecology where news sources are a biased narrative for a particular agency, science can’t necessarily be trusted without looking at the methodology employed and the source of funds, there is ever-increasing technological advancement, and our own internal biases affect us unconsciously. Link.
'The Flywheel Effect' is a concept developed in the book Good to Great. Here, Jim Collins explores further. The flywheel is an interesting analogy about the compound effect. Rather than the story we always hear about one single defining action or 'breakthrough', imagine pushing a big heavy flywheel. Each turn of the flywheel builds upon the work done earlier, compounding your investment of effort. After a while, the flywheel will be at an almost unstoppable momentum. Link.
And a wildcard - astronomers may have detected the most massive collision of two black holes ever discovered. It occurred roughly 7bn years ago and we are only seeing the effects now. Mainly that “the equivalent of 7 suns was destroyed in a fraction of a second”… Link.
Enjoy the rest of your week!
Team Eli5