Initiator Creator - Initiator Creator - Issue 41

Initiator Creator - Issue #41

​By Saurabh Y. // 12 December 2020

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Developer

​The 2020 Web Almanac - HTTP Archive's Annual State of the Web Report - HTTP Archive

The Web Almanac is a comprehensive report on the state of the web, backed by real data and trusted web experts. It is comprised of 22 chapters spanning aspects of page content, user experience, publishing, and distribution. For the preparation of this report 113 people tested 7.5M websites and processed 31.3 TB data and contributed countless hours.

​Designing Data Science Tools at Spotify - Spotify Design

Spotify operates at a massive scale and hence generates a huge amounts of raw data from the millions of listeners. Raw data by itself is not that helpful though; you need to process, manage, and distill it into insights that can inform new features or improvements to the experience. And to do that, companies design tools that ensure these insights can be easily understood. In this article Sabrina Siu, Product designer at Spotify, shared her experience on rebuilding of ScienceBox in the cloud and the lessons they learned while developing it.

​Wasp-lang - A Programming Language for Developing Web Apps in React & Node.js With No Boilerplate - Wasp

Wasp is an open source configuration language (DSL) for developing, building and deploying full-stack web apps with less boilerplate. It integrates with React, Node.js and Prisma.

Designer

​Wireframes Are Useless. Why We Stopped Using Them and How It Improved The Way We Design - UX Collective

An interesting counter to all the arguments that people gives in favor of wireframing like "Wireframes allow us to decide on strategic and content-related questions", "Wireframes allow us to test the product thesis early on" etc. And how Robert Goesch, Co-founder and Product designer at DUMBO, and his team working on various projects without the need of wireframes for last 4 years.

​User Research: Is It Worth It? - Prototypr

Compared to other design professions, UX has a myriad of tools that make it quick and easy to get usable data and make the right decisions. It’s a unique advantage. We don’t need to be perfect at research. But if you work on implementing it and place the user at the heart of your design process, things turn out considerably better.

​Characterz - Biggest Diverse Mix And Match 3D Illustration Library - Characterz

Characterz is the biggest diverse 3D illustration library. You can create more than 9,600,000 combinations of 3D characters. Mix & Match style.

Entrepreneur

​How the Busiest People in SaaS Manage Their Email - OpenView

In this article, leaders of famous SaaS companies like Eric Muntz, CTO at Mailchimp, Tope Awotona, CEO at Calendly, Yamini Rangan, CCO at HubSpot, Christopher O'Donnell, CPO at HubSpot shared their tips and tricks to handle email more effectively.

​What’s in a Name? A lot - On my om

J David Placek, in his book Brand Names That Win has mentioned that “Naming has always been important. But in today’s digital world, naming has become far more critical and far more challenging,” The book bottles his wisdom gathered over three decades and thousands of projects. Projects like Zoom, Slack, and Robinhood. Their names are simple and easy to remember.

​PlatformAbuse - Mitigating Online Abuse - PlatformAbuse

Platform abuse is the intentional or unintentional use of technology that results in societal harm. PlatformAbuse.org is a new resource that helps educate people involved in building online communities about potentially harmful features.

Marketer

​6 Lessons Learned from a Year of Content Strategy - Animalz

Instead of following the same old “best practice” of starting with a list of keywords you think you should own and then letting the results for those keywords drive your writing, start by brainstorming the subjects your team is genuinely passionate about. Let the strength of your ideas guide your keywords, not the other way around.

​Social Media for Small Business: A Guide for 2021 and Beyond - Buffer

Social media will play an increasingly crucial role in supporting small business growth. Here’s how (and why) you should work social media into your plans for 2021 and beyond.

​Why Did Your Website Suddenly Lose Rankings And How To Fix It - Serpstat

The real murder for any SEO is a sudden website traffic and rankings loss. If you're well acquainted with these situations, you should identify the causes of the crash as quickly as possible to fix them and find out how to fix a drop in search engine traffic to the site.

Interesting Read

​ICANN’s Grand Remote Experiment - Increment

Working remotely is still an experiment for ICANN, one being embraced by those who put in the hours to edit and review policy proposals.

​Selective Ignorance: Cultivating Intentional Knowledge In a Chaotic World - Ness Labs

Deliberately spending our time and energy involves some form of selective ignorance, where we actively decide to not engage in certain activities, to not learn about certain topics, or to not develop certain ideas. To choose selective ignorance is to choose intentional knowledge.

Community Submissions

If you like to share a project or article with the rest of the readers then please DM at @ICforpreneurs or hit reply

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​Privacy-Focused Web Analytics by Cloudflare​

Cloudflare announced a new product - web analytics. It is a privacy-first (no cookies and no data collection) tool which allows you to monitor your website visitors, geography devices and more.

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Outro

🙏 Thank you for reading Initiator Creator issue #41

This issue is sponsored by Safetywing. Safetywing is global health insurance for remote workers and digital nomads.

If you value Initiator Creator, feel free to forward this copy to your friends. Suggestions or comments? Hit reply or DM me at @ICforpreneurs​

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