Whether you manage a team of designers, have set up a Design Ops team or are considering doing so, or you just have a stake in design output at your organisation, creating the space for designers to do their best work is a key concern.

And in the spirit of sharing with the wider community, we pondered, can we create a new tool for design teams and their leaders to help them develop their own team's definition of productivity, measure it and improve it?

• None Create a living artefact and a point of reference for ongoing improvements to the designer experience at your organisation Your findings will be different, but in the interest of sharing, our insights fit into the following wider themes: A clear theme emerged around collaboration between designers and engineers.

The press doesn’t care, your investors don’t care, your board doesn’t care, your employees don’t care, even your mama doesn’t care.

Any investments or portfolio companies mentioned, referred to, or described are not representative of all investments in vehicles managed by a16z, and there can be no assurance that the investments will be profitable or that other investments made in the future will have similar characteristics or results.

A list of investments made by funds managed by Andreessen Horowitz (excluding investments and certain publicly traded cryptocurrencies/ digital assets for which the issuer has not provided permission for a16z to disclose publicly) is available at https://a16z.com/investments/.

And so in the year of our lord 2017 I had a Brilliant Startup Idea: use a structured database of clinical trials to provide simple, practical answers to common medical questions.

On July 2, 2018, GlacierMD powered the world's largest depression meta-analysis, using data from 846 trials, beating Cipriani's previous record of 522.

If I'd articulated at the beginning how I expected to extract value from GlacierMD, maybe I would've researched the economics of an ad-based model, or I would've validated that doctors were willing to pay, or hospitals, or insurance companies.

Many games with RPG elements focus heavily on random loot drops, which can lead to collections of items that take up valuable inventory space.

While general loot gathering in games has been around for a long time, it was Diablo II and World of Warcraft that popularized the concept of color-coding their loot.

Although it should be noted that an item's color is not its sole basis for worth; loot is often also associated with a level, meaning it's possible for a higher level Green item to have better stats than a lower level Purple.

Color plays an important role in the branding of games and making them instantly recognizable: the blue and orange of Portal, the bright red of Mirror’s Edge, the meaty red of Super Meat Boy, the purply blue from Super Mario Bros, the hot pink of Hotline Miami.

In addition to making games recognizable, color can also help convey its intended audience: for example, brighter colors are used more in casual games, while more nuanced colors are used in core games.

Impossible colors (or forbidden colors) are colors that, due to the functionality of the retina, are biologically impossible to be seen simultaneously.

Having a target goal or vision is important, and optimizing and tailoring your profile to the target audience your wishing to reach out to is important when optimizing your Github profile.

If you do happen to be looking for a job, the pinned repositories that appear at the top of your profile should showcase repositories that you want to highlight to the recruiter, which should be relevant and show work that has been done.

Writing unit test cases says a lot about you — recruiters such as myself would definitely like to see this showcased, with clear instructions on how to execute your test cases.

Although anthropologists and archeologists still wonder why human beings have for so long organized themselves to fight, the study of war in history and political science departments is fading.

Each year, fewer courses are offered on great conflicts such as the Napoleonic wars, the total wars of the 20th century, and the Cold War.

Yet, despite the overall downturn in university history programs, we know from course enrollments that students are interested in war, as indeed they are in international relations, when they get the chance to study them: At Yale, Paul Kennedy’s “Military History of the West” attracted large crowds; at Toronto’s Ryerson University, international relations courses are the most popular choices among students.

Facebook Inc. and Facebook Ireland have filed a legal action in Portugal against two people for scraping user-profiles and other data from Facebook’s website, in violation of our Terms of Service and Portugal’s Database Protection Law.

When people installed these extensions on their browsers, they were installing concealed code designed to scrape their information from the Facebook website, but also information from the users’ browsers unrelated to Facebook — all without their knowledge.

This case is the result of our ongoing international efforts to detect and enforce against those who scrape Facebook users’ data, including those who use browser extensions to compromise people’s browsers.

Focused almost entirely on visuals (as it should be), the book has few words among its pages, though it does begin with an earnest foreword from Ralph Eggleston, director, production designer and one of the few artists at Pixar who has worked on a feature film from beginning to end.

Though color scripts were not invented by Eggleston or Pixar, the studio would go on to become the first to create a color script for each of its films, yet again influencing the animation industry at large.

Toy Story 3’s color script, on the other hand, done digitally by Dice Tsutsumi, is far longer than Eggleston’s initial script and even Jim Pearson and Bob Cone’s half-finished color scripts for Toy Story 2.

Julian Assange has been refused bail by a judge who this week rejected a US request to have him extradited to face espionage and hacking charges.

After Monday’s rejection of the US extradition request, Edward Fitzgerald QC said Assange “now has every reason to stay in this jurisdiction, where he has the protection of the rule of law and this court’s decision”.

While rejecting arguments that Assange would not get a fair trial in the US, on Monday Baraitser blocked extradition on the basis that procedures in prisons there would not prevent him from potentially taking his own life.

For them, as it was for many, design was the simple act of making ordinary things pretty.The Squiggle came to life at the beginning of the next decade when I had the opportunity to design some complex desktop software.

Picking one from a handful I'd made using a Wacom tablet, I labeled it, and used it to compel the client to allow us to proceed methodically in designing their software.When I was working at IDEO a few years later, a colleague surprised me by having found it online () and using it for the IDEO Intern '06 T-Shirts.

So I published it with a Creative Commons Copyright, making it easy for people to freely use it with attribution.I've personally used the Design Squiggle in almost every client presentation, including in Japan and Korea.

Then we had to come to terms that we couldn’t actually build a full product in the time we had left, and decided that the best we could do was to create a demo or playground that could hint at what the future product could be – and hope for the best.

This amazing traction helped us get into YC several months later, gave us momentum to raise some funding from some angel investors, and most importantly gave us the confidence that we were truly on to something that can be really valuable for the world.

So this is a very belated, but very huge THANK YOU to HN for being kind to a trio of co-founders who wanted to make something valuable for the world, and were at the end of their rope in many ways.

In the old days, when Google (or any poorly tuned AI that Google unleashed) decided it wanted to kill your business, it would usually resort to denying access to one of its multiple walled gardens, and that was that.

This blacklist "feature" is called Google Safe Browsing, and the image here depicts the subtle message your users will see if one of your domains happens to be flagged in the Safe Browsing database.

While our DevOps team was working in full emergency mode to get a new CDN set up and preparing to move customers over onto a new domain, I found that Google's documentation claims that GSB provides additional explanations about why a site has been flagged in the Google Search Console (GSC from now on) of the offending site.

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