A few weeks ago I’ve completed my internship at Disney Research. It was awesome!!! my productivity was at the sky and my creativity felt limitless .

Recently I read an interesting book named Outliers - The story of Success. The first chapter in this book describes the story of a physician, named Wolf, who was eager to find out the reason of how it’s possible that in a specific town in the US, the heart attack rates are 35% lower than expected. Wolf thought that it might be related to dietary but the the experiments were negative. How about genetic? no. Sports? no. Maybe it was something local, something in the air? no - when he checked few of the nearest towns he found out that they have an ordinary heart attack rate… Eventually, he figured out why (spoiler) - He noticed that many homes in this town had three generation in one roof, in addition, there are at least 24 civic...

When you are part of a team, providing visibility on what your work is far from trivial. It’s even harder to provide the correct amount of visibility, not making too much clutter and not working in silence. Visibility is one of the most important traits for a team that aim to achieve an effective progress. It doesn’t really matter whether you are the CEO or the newest employee, all of you should strive to find the right amount for visibility - bottom up and also top down.

While companies can enforce the employee for some kind of visibility by using tools, forms, procedures and processes, the best visibility is achieved when it comes naturally, and for this to happen two cultural attributes are required:

1. You should be excited from your work, from your creation, from what you’ve been spending most of your day to accomplish.

2. You should have an audience who is excited from your work, from...

In my workplace the items in the following list are given, but they cannot be taken for granted: full tests coverage, bug tracking, continuous integration, 5-clicks to production deployment, user analytics, reviewing code / spec / tests / UX / UI / Design, code quality, real-time monitoring, performance tools, being on the technological edge, backlogs, planning, feature breakdown, ETA’s, new laptops, 2 large screens, SSD’s, customized mouse / keyboards, newest IDE’s, foosball, x-box, happy hours, best kitchen in the world.

More important, in my workplace the personal attributes of the teammates are given, yet, it cannot be taken for granted: respectability, responsibility, collective ownership, professionalism, assistance first - everything else second, agile, fun ,strive to production, passionate about the product, having agendas, diverse, smart, challenging, eager to learn, solving...

Why are failures good? because they indicate that you have goals and that you can distinguish between a failure and a success. What is worse than a failure? not knowing that you’ve failed. This means that you didn’t know what are the goals, what is important and what should be focused on.

A doodle is an unfocused drawing while the person’s attention is otherwise occupied. Doodling is fun, and sometimes you can get a very fine drawings from doodling, but don’t expect to get better in drawing from those unfocused doodling. If you want to become a great artist, one hour of a focused drawing with a specific goal like drawing hands, drawing a sheep or any other specific goal, worth many hours of doodling. You can’t fail when you doodle.

If you’re part of a team, and some understand that there is a failure, while other sure that the team is on fire, this means that they don’t know that the...

• 1on1’s - Just do it. Optimally every week, you’ll be surprised how much can happen in a week, a month, or even 3 months! work with your employees on their goals and ambitions, mentor them.
• Be a role model - all the time. Every action you take, your employees will follow you and act like you. Your temper, excitement and motivation will affect the team.
• Be persistence, be decisive - don’t change statements or agendas too much. Be able to explain every mission and to answer the hard questions.
• Don’t close doors - explicitly and implicitly. Be with the team - sit with them, talk with them, eat with them, hear them, work with them.
• Give personality to your team - create motos and agendas, differentiate it explicitly from other teams.
• Never get too far from the actual craftsmanship -the code is the source of truth, if you want to feel and understand the employees frustration and...

As a Software Developer, your coding output depends on your technical design skills. Good technical designs are good if your teammates agree that they are good. A design review is a great tool for getting feedback from your teammates. You and your teammates share the same code, the same working environment, the same manager, the same risks - use your teammates to approve your design and getting better in the next one.

When your technical design is ready, convince the team that your design is good and fit the requirements. But, is your team is ready to support you and the project? Reviewing a design takes time, and developers hates meetings. Sending the design brief by mail is an option, but would it trigger a real deep discussion around the design? The feedback you are getting in mail may be valuable (if it arrives), but it’s not the same as selling your design face to face.

Sending...

My first job as a student was in a QA position. I remember I was able to find 30 bugs on a daily basis, so I was considered as a great QA engineer. Years after, I now understand that my superiority was actually reflecting a big defect in the company process, and most of it was because of employees like me - the company had strong QA engineers so developers could count on us and just write bad code.

As a junior developer, I had the habit of checking myself the feature I develop in all stages, even though it was clear that the feature quality in production will be excellent because we have great QA’s. My “habit” of testing my own features, became part of a bigger change of the role of the QA. Our company made that change - no more QA firewalls. The responsibility of the features quality is only on the developers who code it and there are no more “guardian angels”. If you want your feature...

• Take at least 3 Stanford free online courses - After finishing successfully the excellent Machine Learning course by Andrew Ng, I plan to take next January at least 3 courses - http://www.nlp-class.org , http://www.hci-class.org and http://www.pgm-class.org/
• Publish at least 1 blog post per month.
• Use Mahout to build Hacker-News personalization site - Mathout is a rising scalable machine learning library, and HN is a great data resource to experiment some new recommendation algorithms.
• Participate in Kaggle - Data science is the new sports and Kaggle is a great place to convert intelligence to money :)
• Siggraph 2013? - Publish a CG article that will change the way we consider visualizations
• Experiment with D3 JavaScript library - Data driven document is the future. I hope to use it to visualize some nice CS algorithms and make professors to stop using java applet from 1996 in their...

Behind every Formula 1 driver there is a great team that supports the driver and the car. This team is also responsible to measure the performance on every turn, how was the acceleration, what is the fuel consumption and many indicators that will assist them to get better in the next lap. A winner must be aware for his strength and weakness in every lap, and iterate and improve on the track.

Whether you are a Formula 1 driver or a Software Developer, for improving your performance you first need to define the performance challenge and define some measurable indicators, without it, the chance of getting better is not in your hands. it is important to choose simple measurements that are intuitive to everyone. Furthermore, being persistent on measuring is hard and without tools that will enforce you to do it, you are likely to fail. After defining what should be measured, make sure you...

Many companies perform performance reviews on a yearly basis. In this review you and your manager are required to summarize what are your “improve” , “preserve” and “goals” from the last year following to the next year. In it’s essence this process is wrong, why?

A year is way too long - Our work is so dynamic that your goals and even your managers most probably won’t be the same in the next quarter.

Only your teammates can make you better - but your team is not aware on what you want to improve in.

It’s a company process - it was initiated by the company and not by you, you are the one who is responsible for your future, take it in your hands.

So how can we make performance reviews more effective? make it weekly, share it with your teammates and you are the one who should be responsible on the process. Share every week or so with your team one line of what was good this week and...