Great advice. Also extends to teams, 'What do we all know well enough to execute?' should trump 'What would be fun?' every time. I've worked in situations where someone saying 'Oh I decided to write this in Clojure, even though I'm the only one here who knows it and we're running out of cash' cost significant time and resources to fix (the fix was rewriting the project in plain ol' Python myself). It just isn't a sensible risk to take.
I've worked with people who burned out and had to take time off days before deadlines doing demonstrably less than others who worked 9-6 and made sure it mattered. Delegation is certainly part of the problem, but I think there's a point at which people start buying into the mythos and cargo-culting a 'no work/life balance successful startup', which is really damaging.
In situations like that, much like in real life, it's prudent to have evidence (comments, emails, server logs, whatever) to protect your reputation and show the facts, but that isn't necessarily the same as having these things aired publicly.
The ELK stack is great, powerful, relatively easy to use and set up and very configurable. I'd definitely consider it for any dashboard prototyping, given that I've worked places where the 'MVP' dashboard could've been mocked up in days with ELK rather than the months it took otherwise.
Papers We Love is excellent, some great papers. I forked the repo a while ago, was considering hosting one in Dublin. I think here at least the community seems to have a lot of non-CS people who I'd love to hear from too.
Photoshop definitely wasn't intended for the wide variety of use-cases it now supports, but it is definitely the front-runner for digital painting, 95% of concept artists/comic colourists or similar artists I know or have seen use Photoshop. Krita looks fantastic, really capable, but I haven't had a chance to try it, mainly because all of my brushes and settings are in Photoshop.
Most designers I know will draw on illustrator and maybe finish up in Photoshop. Since Photoshop is a sort of common baseline in the industry it's used as a general tool to aid in the finishing of artwork even when said artwork is not really in its domain.
Illustrator seems widely used in brand and web design alright, but for example concept artists and comic artists I know never leave Photoshop, start to finish.
While I think Krita looks really great what I've found is that artist and designers are some of the most entrenched software users around. The sentiment "you'll want to use Photoshop, because it's the industry standard" is tough to beat. I know some that use Manga Studio, but never without Photoshop to double-check the results.
That's what people said about Quark XPress, but failing to have a smooth transition to MacOSX doomed them. It didn't even have to be a very smooth one, since Adobe took forever to ship the ancestor of creative suite.
I'd agree that it's a precarious hold, but when it's lost I expect it'll be because Adobe did something, artists and designers I've talked to aren't interested in alternatives, or if they are they keep using photoshop alongside it, to check if the CMYK is the same etc, hesistant to trust a new product.
Adobe have done something - Creative Cloud and subscription-based purchasing - and it's given the indie Mac app market (Pixelmator etc.) a huge boost.
More, I suspect there's a delayed effect where people are still holding on to their non-subscription copies of CS. I'm a heavy Illustrator user; I'm still on CS 5.5, but when the time comes to upgrade it won't be to Illustrator CC.
I think the problem of staying on a version of Photoshop has existed for a long while. I agree Creative Cloud is a big misstep, but surprisingly to me some artist friends really like it.
Yes, I'd agree that it's been common to "skip a version" or similar. Effectively you get Photoshop (or whatever) at a reduced cost.
So you can see the logic behind Creative Cloud: Adobe have both prevented this behaviour, and struck against piracy. They're clearly betting that this will outweigh the reduced sales, and that Photoshop/Illustrator/InDesign are so essential that few people will pass it up. I'm not convinced they're right.
Without piracy Adobe would die. It's essentially their noncommercial subscription plan and keeps Photoshop available to students etc. It's a part of Adobe's business model.
Absolutely agree with the first part, have seen this too often, considering it's such an obvious mistake to make. People end up making an 'MVP' that is a whole-cloth beta of what they think people will want, releasing it and seeing it fail, without the necessary focus to get feedback. They are failing fast, but only relative to a big corporation.
I agree, although with enough users this subjective marking effect can be somewhat mitigated. I'll give an example: Steam allowed people to tag games recently, which lead to a lot of 'hardcore gamers' tagging games they didn't like because they had no explicit gameplay as 'Walking Simulator' (Gone Home, Dear Esther etc). This tag is meant as an insult, but for people who like games like this it is actually useful, it's a grouping of games that are interesting to similar people, which is the knowledge Valve presumably wanted to gather.
I would suggest a mix of automated and manual tagging, use both, show the automated or curate the text shown. It should be easy enough to cluster the tags too, one man's walking simulator is another's 'story game' or similar.
