Get serious and focus on personal development

Get smarter and collection information to build knowledge

Get moving and take action

Get excited over your ability to make yourself do the necessary things

Get away and reflect, live well, enjoy life while you can and cultivate good relationships

• Timebox (T):
  • This feels like a hard to reverse the decision, so Michelle aims to make it by the end of the week.
• Generate More Options (O):
  • Michelle uses the Vanishing Option Test to think of alternatives. If she couldn’t rewrite the whole app using Flutter what could she do?
  • Use a hybrid approach and only rewrite a section of the app in Flutter.
  • Have the iOS and Android developers systematically pair-program when implementing features.
  • Use another cross-platform framework such as React Native or Xamarin.
• Meta (M) Decision:
  • What should Michelle optimize for? She comes up with the following hierarchy: 1) cross-platform consistency 2) performance 3) development speed
• Analyze (A) Options:
  • Michelle concludes that for Flutter to be the right choice, a developer should be able to deliver the same level of quality in 50% or less of the time (to account for the risk and learning time of using a new technology).
• Step (S) Back:
  • Michelle decides to make the decision first thing Friday morning and do a 10/10/10 analysis to ensure she’s not putting too much weight on short term emotion.
• Prepare (P) to be Wrong:
  • Michelle decides to timebox a prototype: over the next 2 weeks, she will pair with a developer on her team to build a section of the app using Flutter. She will then ask her team members to do a blind test and see if they can guess which part of the app has been rebuilt using Flutter.

Reference: https://engineering.shopify.com/blogs/engineering/make-great-decisions-quickly-with-tomasp

Follow Ben Shneiderman’s ‘Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design’ if you want to design great, productive and frustration-free user interfaces:

1. Strive for consistency: Standardize the way information is conveyed
2. Enable frequent users to use shortcuts: With increased use comes the demand for quicker methods of completing tasks – Don’t penalize but reward the good user
3. Offer informative feedback: For every action, there should be appropriate, human-readable and relevant feedback
4.  Design dialogue to yield closure: Don’t keep your users guessing. Tell them what their action has led them to. For example, users would appreciate a “Thank You” message and a proof of purchase receipt when they’ve completed an online purchase
5. Offer simple error handling: No one likes to be told they’re wrong, especially your users. Systems should be designed to be as fool-proof as possible, but when unavoidable errors occur, ensure users are provided with simple, intuitive step-by-step instructions to solve the problem as quickly and painlessly as possible. For example, flag the text fields where the users forgot to provide input in an online form
6. Permit easy reversal of actions: This feature relieves anxiety since the user knows that errors can be undone; it thus encourages exploration of unfamiliar options
7. Support internal locus of control: Give users the sense that they are in full control
8. Reduce short-term memory load: Recognizing something is always easier than recall

Reference: https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/shneiderman-s-eight-golden-rules-will-help-you-design-better-interfaces

These are simple techniques to improve your writing:

• avoid the word “that”
• remove the words “I think”
• avoid the words that end in “-ing”
• short sentences. short paragraphs
• shrink your opening sentence

[source] https://medium.com/an-idea-for-you/the-two-minutes-it-takes-to-read-this-will-improve-your-writing-forever-82a7d01441d1#.9vxa6y4aa

I have been thinking about the issue of gun control/ownership in the US and how would one go about finding a resolution to maintain the rights of people to defend themselves while reduce the mass killings and random shootings that happen “presumably” because of widespread accessibility to guns.

There are two arguments for and against gun ownership.
For: It is a constitutional right to defend oneself and have a gun. Plus guns don’t kill people, people kill people (which I don’t agree with but that’s what I hear a lot from proponents of gun ownership).
Against: If you have a gun and can easily obtain one if you don’t, you’re more likely to use violence with gun and commit homicide using a gun.

The two arguments are sound on the surface but contradictory in effect. How can we find a compromise to cut the cons while keeping the pros in gun ownership? Give people guns to defend themselves without giving them mechanism to kill other people?

The answer is in BULLETS!

Modify the bullets in such a way that can make a target unconscious but don’t kill its target. Is it possible? Maybe and possibly YES.

First of all, we already have rubber bullets and they inflict a lot of pain on a human target once hit. They don’t kill but they cause a lot of pain. That’s often enough to deter an attack and potentially disable an intruder. Why is that not enough for people? I don’t know the answer to that and still have to be convinced on why you still need to have lead bullets to defend yourself?!

For the sake of argument, let’s assume that the gun shot has to make its target unconscious and act similarly to a gun with real, lead bullets (without the lethal effect of course). Then, can we design a bullet technology that (similarly to taser guns) can paralyze its target upon impact? Is it possible to have taser bullets rather than taser guns?

I admit that this might be over engineering and too expensive to build; on other hand regardless of what technology or technique proposed, it may never be enough to convince pro guns and NRA in the US to change their minds about guns. But we may be able to change their minds about bullets.