Our species' success does not lie in the power of our individual minds, but in the collective brains of our communities. Build larger and more interconnected societies and you get more know-how and improved technologies. It's a simple equation described in Joseph Henrich's book on cultural evolution, The Secret of Our Success.
This collective brain is defined as a synthesis of cultural and social natures. On the social side, it means that you are able to stick to the (right) norms. On the cultural side, it is your ability to learn from others. And this is our focus for the series that "This month in Around25" is prospected to become. You can choose to see it as a reading list, curated in-house by the Around25 team and presented here at the end of each month.
There will be one main recommendation per issue (one that will involve a larger time investment to get through, like a book or a podcast) and many smaller ones (like articles, talks or clips). The domains might vary abruptly, but I have a hunch they'll revolve around programming & development, with some stops at UI/UX, marketing or startups. We'll see. Keep in mind that towards the end of each issue, there's always going to be a look at one or two open source projects that caught our eye the month that passed.
Now, without further ado, on to the main recommendation of this September's issue.
How to Start a Startup Podcast
a podcast by Y Combinator and Stanford University
What initially was a series of lectures given at Stanford in Fall 2014, became a 20 episode podcast that is up on iTunes. Sam Altman is the teacher of the class at Stanford and describes it as "Everything we know about how to start a startup, for free, from some of the world experts". If you feel the need to watch the original lectures, here is the link to the YouTube playlist.
The next recommendations are in no particular order, but grouped by domain (for those who want to skippy skip).
Web Development
- Writing Readable Code by Tom Hudson Talk
- Mastering Async Await in Node.js Article
- 10 Amazing open source Elixir/Phoenix Apps Article
- React 16: A look inside an API-compatible rewrite of our frontend UI library Article
- How Medium does progressive image loading Article
- So a product manager asks you to fix a bug… Article
Startups
- How to Create a Company Culture from Scratch Article
- How to Build a Startup That Gets Acquired Article
- How to Kick Impostor Syndrome Article
- Startup Idea Validation Is A Numbers Game Article
UI/UX & Design
- Little Big Details For Your Mobile App Article
- Letter to a Junior Designer Article
- What is UX writing? Article
Open-source
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generaptr - a Node.js cli package that generates boilerplate code for a given database structure. It was written by our colleague Darius, mostly during the meet-up/workshop Contributing to Open Source that takes place twice a month at Around25.
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GitPoint- an unofficial GitHub client for mobile written entirely in React-Native.
Take a look at the other issues of This month in Around25 for more quality reads chosen by us!
The acknowledgements go to the contributors of this issue, Cosmin, Darius, Adrian, Anca and Silvia, who supported the idea and provided the majority of the recommendations and, of course, to all authors of the articles and talks above.
We want to hear your favorite reads and ideas too, so get in touch with us!
