Justin Downing jdowning

Why is it so tough to hire a designer?

Value is moving up the stack

As happens in most industries, value creation is moving up the stack. That is, companies make money in new technology-driven arenas at first by differentiating on performance, engineering, cost, etc. As industries evolve, core infrastructure gets built and commoditized, and differentiation moves up the hierarchy of needs from basic functionality to non-basic functionality, to design, and even to fashion.

For example, there was a time when chief buying concerns included how well a watch might tell time and how durable a pair of jeans was. There is still plenty of core technology to be built for the Internet, but the fact that you can now be a fairly sizable Internet company without ever needing to own (or even look at) your server hardware means a much bigger proportion of what companies do is add value on top what’s here. And one of the most powerful ways to add value is through design.

-- Evan Williams (@ev)
https://ev.mediu

Make it real

Ideas are cheap. Make a prototype, sketch a CLI session, draw a wireframe. Discuss around concrete examples, not hand-waving abstractions. Don't say you did something, provide a URL that proves it.

Ship it

Nothing is real until it's being used by a real user. This doesn't mean you make a prototype in the morning and blog about it in the evening. It means you find one person you believe your product will help and try to get them to use it.

Do it with style

Set variables to use in template:

# note: these are example values
export AWS_ACCOUNT_ID=012345678901         
export HEROKU_DATA_ACCOUNT_ID=098765432109

Use the key policy with the variables:

envsubst &lt; key_policy.json

Keybase proof

I hereby claim:

I am jdowning on github.
I am jdowning (https://keybase.io/jdowning) on keybase.
I have a public key whose fingerprint is 68D8 9FAB CAF1 5069 B527 73FC 03D3 44B2 954C DD6A

To claim this, I am signing this object:

	# Bonus: you could use jq and save the value in env vars to be passed into later commands
	❯ heroku api post /sources
	POST api.heroku.com/sources... 201
	{
	"source_blob": {
	"get_url": "presigned_s3_GET_url",
	"put_url": "presigned_s3_PUT_url"
	}
	}

	<Creator>
	<Name>Venu</Name>
	<UnitId>3322992137</UnitId>
	<ProductID>3226</ProductID>
	<Version>
	<VersionMajor>6</VersionMajor>
	<VersionMinor>50</VersionMinor>
	<BuildMajor>0</BuildMajor>
	<BuildMinor>0</BuildMinor>
	</Version>

	#!/usr/bin/env bash
	set -euo pipefail

	HOST=$1

	while true
	do
	echo -n "$(date)"

	for p in 10001 10002 10003

	{
	"Id": "KMS-policy",
	"Version": "2012-10-17",
	"Statement": [
	{
	"Sid": "Enable IAM User Permissions",
	"Effect": "Allow",
	"Principal": {
	"AWS": "arn:aws:iam::<your_aws_account_id>:root"
	},

	Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
	\| Status=Not/Inst/Conf-files/Unpacked/halF-conf/Half-inst/trig-aWait/Trig-pend
	\|/ Err?=(none)/Reinst-required (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
	\|\|/ Name Version Architecture Description
	+++-============================-===================-===================-=============================================================
	ii acl 2.2.52-3 amd64 Access control list utilities
	ii acpid 1:2.0.26-1ubuntu2 amd64 Advanced Configuration and Power Interface event daemon
	ii adduser 3.113+nmu3ubuntu4 all add and remove users and groups
	ii apparmor 2.10.95-0ubuntu2.11 amd64 user-space parser utility for AppArmor
	ii apport 2.20.1-0ubuntu2.20 all automatically generate crash reports for debugging

	mkdir ~/vim
	cd ~/vim

	# Staically linked vim version compiled from https://github.com/ericpruitt/static-vim
	# Compiled on Jul 20 2017
	curl --silent 'https://s3.amazonaws.com/bengoa/vim-static.tar.gz' \| tar -xz

	cat <<EOF > $HOME/vimenv
	export VIMRUNTIME="$HOME/vim/runtime"
	export PATH="$HOME/vim:$PATH"