Read These Later – Week 28

Links to articles and posts that I’ve found interesting in the last week:

1. An Ethnographic Study of UX Professionals: ‘UX professionals are some of the most professionally unhappy folks I’ve ever encountered.”

2. 5 Myths That Can Kill A Startup: “Some companies have an unfortunate culture that mandates relentlessly hard work. When things get tough, people work harder. When things are good, people work harder still to try to keep the “good times rolling.” But this cycle of doom will ultimately fail as people burn out, get sick or simply quit.”

3. Confidence For Good: “People, both women and men, should be so fiercely passionate about good ideas that self-promotion is a natural extension. Otherwise, why is it worth doing in the first place? It’s when confidence and self-promotion are obfuscated from passion that the claims become flimsy and empty.”

4. Hi There: “Life is getting friendlier but less interesting. Blame technology, globalisation and feminism.”

5. Boarding Pass Fail: Redesigning the airline boarding pass.

6. Use Twitter in Your Next Presentation (ed. note: I was unlucky enough to witness a terrible presentation last week and walked away wishing the presenter had boiled down her points to 140 characters each – turns out there’s a strategy for that)

7. And finally… my bacon side project, House of Sticks, competed in a blind taste off against 8 other local and national brands last night. For a couple of guys with a hand-welded smoker in Oakland, we didn’t do that bad.