This is our bi-weekly newsletter of interesting stuff in business, design, and tech. If there is something you’d like more of or things we could be doing better then get in touch with lauren@eli5.io.
From, Eli5
💼 Business
“Why now is the time to solve problems”. A look at why we need to innovate smart as soon as possible, written before we knew that the world would be the way it is right now. This article has only become more relevant with each passing month. Link.
What will the automated city of the future look like? As the populations of cities across the world continue to swell, governments are starting to realise automation could be the key to managing them. From self-driving cars, to vertical farms - there is a solution for almost anything in this piece from the Smithsonian Magazine. Link.
✏️ Design
16 incredibly useful wireframe and UI kits for web designers from the folk at Webflow. Link.
As searches for more inclusive products rise - Pinterest has updated their algorithms to increase the discoverability of beauty products and tutorials personalised to individual skin tone, style, and preference. Link.
🖥️ Technology
After switching from Apple Music to Spotify, one of our developers started looking at how to build a recommender system like theirs. Collaborative filtering is a method of making predictions about the interests of a user by collecting preferences or taste information from many users. And he discovered Google has made a wonderful tutorial on how to make such an algorithm. Link.
A great talk from the Cloud Next ’19 event about the differences between Dev-Ops and SRE. It also gives a very good breakdown of the history of Dev-Ops, plus the cultural aspect of company culture and how that affects software development. Recommended ( not just for techies). Link.
🕹️ Cool stuff
The Fairphone 3+ has just been released. A Dutch phone company that makes ethical and sustainable smartphones, Fairphone pays its workers the living wage, makes self-repairs as easy as possible, and is modular. This means you can upgrade it with new bits and pieces over time (e.g. a new camera). Link.
And for those of us who grew up with Lightgun games like Duck Hunt, Point Blank and Time Crisis - the Sinden Lightgun. Before now, the only way to get the arcade shooting experience at home was to keep an old TV and consoles around. The Sinden Lightgun uses smart image recognition, some clever maths and clever software (plus experimental 3D tracking) to bring some of our most beloved games back. Link.
Enjoy the rest of your week!
Team Eli5