Testing Business Ideas, by David J. Bland and Alexander Osterwalder, is a business book. I read The Lean Startup earlier this year, which talks a lot about the need to validate your ideas (you know, before you bet your whole company on your assumptions).
I knew a few ways myself, but this book goes deep into the various ways, how useful the evidence from them is, the best ways to do them and how they connect, including examples in some cases. Usually several pages worth per method, including some very useful ideas on the best way to implement them.
There are classics, such as customer interview, expert stakeholder interviews, e-mail campaigns, online ads, link tracking, customer support analysis, and many many more.
Domain Driven Design Fundamentals is a course by Julie Lerman and Steve Smith on Pluralsight . I had already seen several courses by Steve Smith (such as Kanban: Getting Started), and was interested in the topic, so I started it right way after PS notified me of the new course.
This is what Wikipedia uses for a definition of DDD:
“Domain-driven design (DDD) is the concept that the structure and language of software code (class names, class methods, class variables) should match the business domain. For example, if a software processes loan applications, it might have classes such as LoanApplication and Customer, and methods such as AcceptOffer and Withdraw.
DDD connects the implementation to an evolving model. Insert in your articleDomain-driven design is predicated on the following goals:
placing the project's primary focus on the core domain and domain logic;
basing complex designs on a model of the domain;
initiating a creative collaboration between technical and domain experts to iteratively refine a conceptual model that addresses particular domain problems.
The term was coined by Eric Evans in his book of the same title.”
While some of this seems less relevant, I think that the overall concept seems great.
And in this particular course, I really liked the example code. It covers making large parts of a Veterinary system for scheduling, complete with a Blazor app and a backend that includes e-mail confirmations, RabbitMQ, and a whole lot of interesting bits. It also has docker images, which can very helpful in projects with a lot of moving parts.
Screpy is a tool that scans your websites and gives you a lot of information on it.
It has:
List of your pages
Page speed for all your pages
Keyword Tracking (with support for specific locations, which can be useful, for obvious reasons)
SEO reports (it certainly found a lot of stuff in my main site) – it is supposed to be AI-Enhanced, but I have no idea what that is in this case.
Syntax Issues
Uptime tracking
Vulnerability tracking!
Real-time e-mails
AI-Content analysis
Finding keywords and keyword clusters
I just got it, but I really like it so far. It looks amazing (I wish my site looked like this…), and it has a ton of suggestions (many, unfortunately, that I already knew I had to get around to), and also some I had no idea.
Some of the tasks it added:
Removed Unused CSS Rules
Removed Unused Javascript
Broken canonical link
Meta Description not found
Use responsive images
Too Small Font Sizes
Tap Targets
and a whole lot more (they have priorities too, which seems like a good idea on a list that big)
There are very large explanation boxes in each of those items, too.
The dashboard view is pretty much excellent, and shows a lot of information. I'd add more graphics, but right now it is kind of embarrassing…
I actually already had tools that supposedly did pretty much everything this does, in one form or another, but their approach and the ability to do all of that in a single place is great.
So far, all the suggestions I've seen make sense (which has NOT always been the case with other tools – a lot of false positives here and there).
Also, some had subscriptions, which I won't need anymore…
It seems to have a lot of video tutorials, which is good, because there is a lot I don't know how to get to yet (unfortunately I can't seem to full screen some of these, so they are super tiny and hard to see…).
Not surprisingly, they have various limits on numbers of pages, projects, etc depending on the level you subscribe at. I got the basic Appsumo subscription, which seemed adequate for my purposes. Another thing that changes with your user level is the time for analysis to repeat, in my case it is 7 days and supposedly it will also look for new pages, which is obviously better than having to go back to do manual refreshes.
The 1-Page Marketing Plan: Get New Customers, Make More Money and Stand Out from the Crowd – by Allan Dib, is (obviously enough) a book about marketing.
I just took a MBA course about marketing and had to write a marketing plan as the final paper, so I looked up resources on it. This one came up.
I didn't expect it to be so good. Frankly, in many ways it is as good as a couple of MBA courses on the subject. AND more enjoyable to read, too.
This is chock-full with great advice I've seen elsewhere (or used myself with good results), and a lot more that I had never seen before.
If you have a company, product, service, you really should read this book. It is well worth the time and money.
Implementing Lean Software Development: From Concept to Cash, by Mary Poppendieck and Tom Poppendieck is a bit old by now, but after taking a few courses on Lean practices, it is easy to see the references to this book.
And even better, some of these courses were rather generic (for use of Lean as a general practice), and this one is more specific to software.
While I did use the equivalent of some of the lean practices (specially the quick releases to get feedback), I mostly didn't test assumptions before releases, as it doesn't always make sense (sometimes it is worth developing something for the exercise or because you want to use it yourself). There are, of course, many other parts to lean practices, but this stuck with me because it is a big part of The Lean Startup, which I also read recently.
I learned a lot from this, and although a lot don't apply to me (mostly the team/large enterprise stuff), a lot does, and I will keep it in mind.
Overall, strongly recommend for developers and all interested in applying lean practices. I read the Safari version.
Kanban is an interesting methodology that can be used in many places – it became common in manufacturing after Toyota invented and had great success, and it can also be useful in daily life and software development.
Kanban is about maximizing flow in systems, which is usually very useful, reducing waste and helping find bottlenecks.
It is also relatively simple, vs scrum and more complicated methods, and can be used in many different ways.
I particularly like that the course had a separate section for single and team use. Some specific services (such as Trello) are mentioned, but mostly briefly. As also are physical boards.
Overall, I found this course quite useful, and it certainly left me interested in using Kanban in practice.
I have just finished reading The Lean Startup, by Eric Ries. I had it since 2014, and for whatever reason had not got around to reading it.
I really, really liked it. There are a lot of insights on how to run a company without guesswork – actually testing assumptions about your customers and products. Also, about the power of having quick cycles instead of multi year release dates.
There is actually a lot I've read elsewhere or had in courses, but given how the book was popular I guess that is not surprising. Some of the examples were the same, even.
I have never actually used it – although I have used other IDEs by JetBrains – so there was a lot of interesting things compared to my usual JS/HTML IDE (Notepad++, for minimal touch-ups on my main site).
The course only takes a few hours, and was pretty clear. I viewed most of it at 120% speed, and the instructor was still very clear at this speed.
Overall, recommended if you already have access to PluralSight courses and are interested in WebStorm.
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