Download or read book Competing with Unicorns written by Jonathan Rasmusson and published by Pragmatic Bookshelf. This book was released on 2020-03-16 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today's tech unicorns develop software differently. They've developed a way of working that lets them scale like an enterprise while working like a startup. These techniques can be learned. This book takes you behind the scenes and shows you how companies like Google, Facebook, and Spotify do it. Leverage their insights, so your teams can work better together, ship higher-quality product faster, innovate more quickly, and compete with the unicorns. Massively successful tech companies, or Unicorns, have discovered how to take the techniques that made them successful as a startup and scale them to the enterprise level. Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Spotify all work like startups, despite having workforces numbering in the tens of thousands. Ex-Spotify engineer and coach, Jonathan Rasmusson, takes you behind the scenes and shows you how to develop software the way the best companies do it. Learn how to give teams purpose through Missions, empower and trust with Squads, and align large scale efforts through Bets. Create the culture necessary to make it happen. If you're a tech or product lead and you want to ship product better, this is your playbook on how the world's best do it. If you're an engineer, tester, analyst, or project manager, and you suspect there are better ways you could be working, you are correct. This book will show you how. And if you're a manager, Agile coach, or someone just charged with improving how your company ships software, this book will give you the tools, techniques, and practices of the world's most innovative, delivery-focused companies. Don't just admire the top companies - learn from them.

Download or read book The Agile Samurai written by Jonathan Rasmusson and published by Pragmatic Bookshelf. This book was released on 2010-09-25 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Printed in full color. Faced with a software project of epic proportions? Tired of over-committing and under-delivering? Enter the dojo of the agile samurai, where agile expert Jonathan Rasmusson shows you how to kick-start, execute, and deliver your agile projects. Combining cutting-edge tools with classic agile practices, The Agile Samurai gives you everything you need to deliver something of value every week and make rolling your software into production a non-event. Get ready to kick some software project butt. By learning the ways of the agile samurai you will discover: how to create plans and schedules your customer and your team can believe in what characteristics make a good agile team and how to form your own how to gather requirements in a fraction of the time using agile user stories what to do when you discover your schedule is wrong, and how to look like a pro correcting it how to execute fiercely by leveraging the power of agile software engineering practices By the end of this book you will know everything you need to set up, execute, and successfully deliver agile projects, and have fun along the way. If you're a project lead, this book gives you the tools to set up and lead your agile project from start to finish. If you are an analyst, programmer, tester, usability designer, or project manager, this book gives you the insight and foundation necessary to become a valuable agile team member. The Agile Samurai slices away the fluff and theory that make other books less-than-agile. It's packed with best practices, war stories, plenty of humor and hands-on tutorial exercises that will get you doing the right things, the right way. This book will make a difference.

Download or read book Skandar and the Unicorn Thief written by A.F. Steadman and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2022-05-03 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Soar into a breathtaking world of heroes and unicorns as you’ve never seen them before in this fantastical middle grade debut perfect for fans of the Percy Jackson and Eragon series! Skandar Smith has always yearned to leave the Mainland and escape to the secretive Island, where wild unicorns roam free. He’s spent years studying for his Hatchery exam, the annual test that selects a handful of Mainlander thirteen-year-olds to train to become unicorn riders. But on the day of Skandar’s exam, things go horribly wrong, and his hopes are shattered…until a mysterious figure knocks on his door at midnight, bearing a message: the Island is in peril and Skandar must answer its call. Skandar is thrust into a world of epic sky battles, dangerous clashes with wild unicorns, and rumors of a shadowy villain amassing a unicorn army. And the closer Skandar grows to his newfound friends and community of riders, the harder it becomes to keep his secrets—especially when he discovers their lives may all be in graver danger than he ever imagined.

Download or read book How to Kill a Unicorn written by Mark Payne and published by Crown Currency. This book was released on 2014-10-07 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A unique behind-the-scenes look at the groundbreaking methodology that today's most in-demand innovation factory uses to create some of the boldest products and successfully bring them to market. Today, innovation is seen by business leaders and the media alike as the key to growth, a burning issue in every company, from startups to the Fortune 500. And in that space, Fahrenheit 212 is viewed as a high-performance innovation SWAT team, able to solve the most complex, mission-critical challenges. Under Mark Payne, the firm's president and head of Idea Development, Fahrenheit 212, since its inception a decade ago, has worked with such giants of industry as Coca-Cola, Samsung, Hershey's, Campbell's Soup, LG, Starbucks, Mattel, Office Depot, Citibank, P&G, American Express, Nutrisystem, GE, and Goldman Sachs, to name but a few. It has been praised as a hotspot for innovation in publications like Fortune, Esquire, Businessweek, and FastCompany. What Drives Fahrenheit 212's success is its unique methodology, combining what it calls Magic--the creative side of innovation--with Money, the business side. They explore every potential idea with the end goal in mind--bringing an innovative product to market in a way that will transform a company's business and growth. In How to Kill a Unicorn, Mark Payne pulls back the curtain on how the company is able to bring more innovative products and ideas successfully to market than any other firm and offers blow by blow inside accounts of how they grapple with and solved their biggest challenges.

Download or read book Super Founders written by Ali Tamaseb and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2021-05-18 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Super Founders uses a data-driven approach to understand what really differentiates billion-dollar startups from the rest—revealing that nearly everything we thought was true about them is false! Ali Tamaseb has spent thousands of hours manually amassing what may be the largest dataset ever collected on startups, comparing billion-dollar startups with those that failed to become one—30,000 data points on nearly every factor: number of competitors, market size, the founder’s age, his or her university’s ranking, quality of investors, fundraising time, and many, many more. And what he found looked far different than expected. Just to mention a few: Most unicorn founders had no industry experience; There's no disadvantage to being a solo founder or to being a non-technical CEO; Less than 15% went through any kind of accelerator program; Over half had strong competitors when starting--being first to market with an idea does not actually matter. You will also hear the stories of the early days of billion-dollar startups first-hand. The book includes exclusive interviews with the founders/investors of Zoom, Instacart, PayPal, Nest, Github, Flatiron Health, Kite Pharma, Facebook, Stripe, Airbnb, YouTube, LinkedIn, Lyft, DoorDash, Coinbase, and Square, venture capital investors like Elad Gil, Peter Thiel, Alfred Lin from Sequoia Capital and Keith Rabois of Founders Fund, as well as previously untold stories about the early days of ByteDance (TikTok), WhatsApp, Dropbox, Discord, DiDi, Flipkart, Instagram, Careem, Peloton, and SpaceX. Packed with counterintuitive insights and inside stories from people who have built massively successful companies, Super Founders is a paradigm-shifting and actionable guide for entrepreneurs, investors, and anyone interested in what makes a startup successful.

Download or read book Competing in the New World of Work written by Keith Ferrazzi and published by Harvard Business Press. This book was released on 2022-02-15 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Wall Street Journal bestseller The #1 New York Times bestselling author on how to use radical adaptability to win in a world of unprecedented change. You've shed antiquated systems and processes. You went all-in on digital. Your teams settled into new, often better, ways of doing things. But did your organization change enough to stay competitive in the post-pandemic world? Did you fully leverage the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to leap forward and grow stronger? Are you shaping the new environment to your advantage? If not, it's not too late to learn from the best. New York Times #1 bestselling author Keith Ferrazzi, along with coauthors Kian Gohar and Noel Weyrich, shows leaders how to shape their organizations and practices to remain competitive in a new, post-pandemic context. Based on an ambitious global research initiative involving thousands of executives, innovators, and changemakers who redefined their strategies, business models, organizational systems, and even their cultures, Competing in the New World of Work: Offers a bold new vision for the organization of the future Reveals the workplace innovations that emerged during the pandemic Defines the new model of leadership—radical adaptability—for sustaining continuous change throughout the coming years of opportunity and transformation Competing in the New World of Work is both your inspiration and your road map to embracing new realities, motivating talent, and winning bold frontiers.

Download or read book Camping with Unicorns written by Dana Simpson and published by Andrews McMeel Publishing. This book was released on 2020-03-23 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Life is never boring when your best friend is a unicorn! The latest installment in this bestselling series is full of mischief, magic and adventure — as well as an important reminder to always stay true to yourself. School’s out, so Phoebe and her unicorn best friend, Marigold Heavenly Nostrils, have the entire summer to play games, visit the pool, and even go camping. Unicorn horns are excellent utensils for roasting things over the campfire, too, even if Marigold prefers toasted apples to s’mores. While exploring in the woods, Phoebe and friends meet a unicorn named Alabaster, who uses a special video game console that’s powered by plants. Throughout her summer adventures, Phoebe learns that being cool isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and that it’s much better to be your true self. It’s all part of the unforgettable experience of Camping with Unicorns.

Download or read book To Kill a Unicorn written by John Corwin and published by . This book was released on 2020-04-10 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: KILL A UNICORN OR DIE TRYINGThe gods are dead. The fae rule Gaia.Cain used to kill for the fae. The only human to become a member of the Oblivion Guard, he killed one time too many and had enough. Leaving it all behind wasn't as easy as turning in a resignation. But the fae had trained him well and soon it was they who bargained for him to leave Feary and live in exile in Gaia.Now a tracker for an assassination and bounty hunting agency, Cain doesn't kill anymore. When his mission to track a teenage girl goes horribly wrong, he and the girl end up on the run from powerful forces the likes of which he's never seen before.That's because the fae have been hiding a terrible secret. The gods aren't dead. In fact, they're very much alive and killing humans they deem too powerful to survive. The girl is in their crosshairs and now he is too.To make matters worse, Cain discovers he's dying from the curse of Cthulhu. The cure? Eating a living, beating unicorn heart. Cain thought unicorns were extinct, but a mystery party offers him salvation: a unicorn for the assassination of the leader of the Mages Guild. With the gods, the fae, and the rest of the supernatural world hunting the hunter, the odds don't look good. But Cain has survived too much to give up now. And the high and mighty are about to find out what real fear feels like.

Download or read book C Brain Teasers written by Dan Gookin and published by Pragmatic Bookshelf. This book was released on 2024-03-21 with total page 101 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: You thought you knew C, but can you solve 25 puzzles in this popular programming language? Noted C programmer and author Dan Gookin provides a series of pointed questions, puzzles, and problems to keep your C programming skills sharp. Each one will provide insight into various aspects of handling strings, numeric operations, and other activities, giving you techniques to take the best advantage of all C has to offer. Challenge yourself, and get to know some powerful tricks and details for writing better, faster, more accurate C code. Most C programming books present the information sequentially, teaching you the right way to code and only rarely describing what could go wrong. In this book, the goal is to find out what did go wrong - or what potentially goes right. Explore interesting and unusual programming concepts and approaches with small, to-the-point, programs and exercises. Hone your C programming skills and expand your knowledge. By working through the brain teasers in this book, you'll fill in gaps in your knowledge and work with advanced concepts such as pointers and recursion. All of the teaser topics were selected to give you food for thought, explaining the technical details behind each puzzle. Look at a code sample and try to guess what output it will give. Code it yourself and see the result. Is it what you expected? Then read the author's lighthearted explanation of exactly why the language does what it does, and how you can take advantage of it. You'll come away with a much better understanding of how the language works, and how to use it for efficient and effective programming. What You Need: You need to know the basics of coding in C, and have an environment for compiling and executing your C code. Any Windows, MacOS, or Linux system with a C compiler does the job. Use the terminal window for traditional C programming. Or obtain an Integrated Development Enviornment (IDE) such as Visual Studio Code, which contains all the software tools you need: Editor, Compiler, and Output.

Download or read book Modern Monopolies written by Alex Moazed and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2016-05-31 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What do Google, Snapchat, Tinder, Amazon, and Uber have in common, besides soaring market share? They're platforms - a new business model that has quietly become the only game in town, creating vast fortunes for its founders while dominating everyone's daily life. A platform, by definition, creates value by facilitating an exchange between two or more interdependent groups. So, rather that making things, they simply connect people. The Internet today is awash in platforms - Facebook is responsible for nearly 25 percent of total Web visits, and the Google platform crash in 2013 took about 40 percent of Internet traffic with it. Representing the ten most trafficked sites in the U.S., platforms are also prominent over the globe; in China, they hold the top eight spots in web traffic rankings. The advent of mobile computing and its ubiquitous connectivity have forever altered how we interact with each other, melding the digital and physical worlds and blurring distinctions between "offline" and "online." These platform giants are expanding their influence from the digital world to the whole economy. Yet, few people truly grasp the radical structural shifts of the last ten years. In Modern Monopolies, Alex Moazed and Nicholas L. Johnson tell the definitive story of what has changed, what it means for businesses today, and how managers, entrepreneurs, and business owners can adapt and thrive in this new era.

Download or read book The Unicorn Problem written by Mitchell J. Frangadakis and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2016-07-14 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beginning with the ancient Vedas of India to this century, what we call "The Truth" is interspersed with impassioned convictions, superstitious beliefs, inspired revelations, and intriguing, yet ultimately contradictory, versions of reality. Through parables, religious doctrines, philosophy, and the proclamations of modern science, we are offered competing narratives regarding incontrovertible truths, and consequently, Ultimate Reality. These competing epistemological traditions have necessarily implanted the ground of human knowledge with both error and uncertainty - the fertile soil in which Unicorns abound and proliferate - leaving us with solutions to life's perennial questions that must ultimately remain incomplete. The fundamental purpose of this book is to assist the reader in the recognition of these Unicorns and their sanctuaries, since it is our most adamant beliefs that determine how we live our lives, and, perhaps most importantly, define our moral outlook

Download or read book Agile Retrospectives Second Edition written by Esther Derby and published by Pragmatic Bookshelf. This book was released on 2024-02-23 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an uncertain and complex world, learning is more important than ever before. In fact, it can be a competitive advantage. Teams and organizations that learn rapidly deliver greater customer value faster and more reliably. Furthermore, those teams are more engaged, more productive, and more satisfied. The most effective way to enable teams to learn is by holding regular retrospectives. Unfortunately, many teams only get shallow results from their retrospectives. This book is filled with practical advice, techniques, and real-life examples that will take retrospectives to the next level--whether your team is co-located, hybrid, or remote. This book will help team leads, scrum masters, and coaches engage their teams to learn, improve, and deliver greater results. For nearly two decades, scrum masters, team leads, and coaches have relied on the first edition of Agile Retrospectivesas an essential resource to facilitate better retrospectives. This edition builds on recent research, reflects the authors' experiences over two decades, and shares wisdom gleaned from the global retrospective community. Find practical advice to level up retrospective skills. Address the challenges of remote and hybrid retrospectives head on. Take advantage of expanded guidance on designing and facilitating retrospectives--based on the questions and concerns of practitioners worldwide. Gain insight into choosing a broad or narrow focus for retrospectives. Explore how to use both objective and subjective data to enable more effective conversations. Learn how to make decisions that stick. Understand the importance of psychological safety and how to foster it in retrospectives. Elevate issues and engage managers in systemic change. Learn from many real-life stories that demonstrate how our advice has impacted retrospectives at organizations around the globe. Finally, find a set of recommended flows that reveal the authors' thought process in designing retrospectives for scenarios teams faced in real life.

Download or read book Unicorn Uncovered written by Whitney Sanderson and published by North Star Editions, Inc.. This book was released on 2020-01-01 with total page 45 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ruby sneaks Starfire to the hospital to cheer up a friend. But after a video of Starfire is posted online, newspaper and TV reporters come looking for the unicorn. Can Ruby and Iris protect the unicorn magic? Or will the secret of Enchanted Realm—and the unicorns—be uncovered?

Download or read book The Way of the Web Tester written by Jonathan Rasmusson and published by Pragmatic Bookshelf. This book was released on 2016-09-22 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is for everyone who needs to test the web. As a tester, you'll automate your tests. As a developer, you'll build more robust solutions. And as a team, you'll gain a vocabulary and a means to coordinate how to write and organize automated tests for the web. Follow the testing pyramid and level up your skills in user interface testing, integration testing, and unit testing. Your new skills will free you up to do other, more important things while letting the computer do the one thing it's really good at: quickly running thousands of repetitive tasks. This book shows you how to do three things: How to write really good automated tests for the web. How to pick and choose the right ones. * How to explain, coordinate, and share your efforts with others. If you're a traditional software tester who has never written an automated test before, this is the perfect book for getting started. Together, we'll go through everything you'll need to start writing your own tests. If you're a developer, but haven't thought much about testing, this book will show you how to move fast without breaking stuff. You'll test RESTful web services and legacy systems, and see how to organize your tests. And if you're a team lead, this is the Rosetta Stone you've been looking for. This book will help you bridge that testing gap between your developers and your testers by giving your team a model to discuss automated testing, and most importantly, to coordinate their efforts. The Way of the Web Tester is packed with cartoons, graphics, best practices, war stories, plenty of humor, and hands-on tutorial exercises that will get you doing the right things, the right way.

Download or read book Build Websites with Hugo written by Brian P. Hogan and published by Pragmatic Bookshelf. This book was released on 2020-05-06 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Database-driven sites bring complexity you might not need, but building a site by hand is too much work. Hugo is a static site generator and web development framework that creates content sites quickly without the overhead or dependencies of a dyanmic web framework. With Hugo, you use HTML templates and Markdown to build static sites you can host anywhere, letting you use the skills you already have. Develop your own theme using standard HTML and CSS, using Hugo’s powerful templating features to organize your site’s components. Create your site’s content with HTML or Markdown and use Hugo’s content templating features to build new content quickly. Build a fully-featured blog with archive pages, tagging, and pagination, and integrate an external commenting system to provide interactivity. Use data from front-matter, site-wide configuration, and external JSON sources to add content, and generate JSON others can use. Integrate JavaScript with your site to create a search engine. Get Hugo working with Webpack so you can leverage the wider web development ecosystem, and explore ways to publish your site to various services. Finally, learn how you can move your existing content site to Hugo. Dive in and build your next site with Hugo!

Download or read book Become an Effective Software Engineering Manager written by James Stanier and published by Pragmatic Bookshelf. This book was released on 2020-06-09 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Software startups make global headlines every day. As technology companies succeed and grow, so do their engineering departments. In your career, you'll may suddenly get the opportunity to lead teams: to become a manager. But this is often uncharted territory. How can you decide whether this career move is right for you? And if you do, what do you need to learn to succeed? Where do you start? How do you know that you're doing it right? What does "it" even mean? And isn't management a dirty word? This book will share the secrets you need to know to manage engineers successfully. Going from engineer to manager doesn't have to be intimidating. Engineers can be managers, and fantastic ones at that. Cast aside the rhetoric and focus on practical, hands-on techniques and tools. You'll become an effective and supportive team leader that your staff will look up to. Start with your transition to being a manager and see how that compares to being an engineer. Learn how to better organize information, feel productive, and delegate, but not micromanage. Discover how to manage your own boss, hire and fire, do performance and salary reviews, and build a great team. You'll also learn the psychology: how to ship while keeping staff happy, coach and mentor, deal with deadline pressure, handle sensitive information, and navigate workplace politics. Consider your whole department. How can you work with other teams to ensure best practice? How do you help form guilds and committees and communicate effectively? How can you create career tracks for individual contributors and managers? How can you support flexible and remote working? How can you improve diversity in the industry through your own actions? This book will show you how. Great managers can make the world a better place. Join us.

Download or read book iOS Unit Testing by Example written by Jon Reid and published by Pragmatic Bookshelf. This book was released on 2020-06-22 with total page 532 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fearlessly change the design of your iOS code with solid unit tests. Use Xcode's built-in test framework XCTest and Swift to get rapid feedback on all your code - including legacy code. Learn the tricks and techniques of testing all iOS code, especially view controllers (UIViewControllers), which are critical to iOS apps. Learn to isolate and replace dependencies in legacy code written without tests. Practice safe refactoring that makes these tests possible, and watch all your changes get verified quickly and automatically. Make even the boldest code changes with complete confidence. Manual code and UI testing get slower the deeper your navigation hierarchy goes. It can take several taps just to reach a particular screen, never mind the actual workflow tests. Automatic unit testing offers such rapid feedback that it can change the rules of development. Bring testing to iOS development, even for legacy code. Use XCTest to write unit tests in Swift for all your code. iOS developers typically reserve unit tests for their model classes alone. But that approach skips most of the code common to iOS apps, especially with UIViewControllers. Learn how to unit test these view controllers to expand your unit testing possibilities. Since good unit tests form the bedrock for safe refactoring, you're empowered to make bold changes. Learn how to avoid the most common mistakes Swift programmers make with the XCTest framework. Use code coverage to find holes in your test suites. Learn how to identify hard dependencies. Reshape the design of your code quickly, with less risk and less fear.