General Assembly
Post date: May 2, 2014 10:20:39 AM
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This entry was posted in Data Analysis and tagged algorithm, analytics, data, data scienceon May 1, 2014 by General Assembly.
By Alex Cowan
Meet Alex Cowan, entrepreneur (5x), intrapreneur (1x), author, and instructor at General Assembly. He’s also the author of ‘Starting a Tech Business’. When he’s not teaching at GA, he’s often found advising companies and posting instructional materials for innovators and instructions on alexandercowan.com. This is the second post in Alex’s series on Storyboarding. Click here to read his introductory post.
Outstanding products are the accumulation of many thoughtful details. Particularly in more mature categories, consistently thoughtful execution is probably more important than grand inspiration.
Agile’s primary input, user stories, have always been a great way to get that consistency. Sadly, they’re not a silver bullet and their impact is often marginalized because of weak stories. Quality stories that really represent users should thread back to personas & problem scenarios, meaning that you have a vivid depiction of who this user is and what underlying need the story’s addressing. Without this, the user stories may end up as a specification for something thought up ‘inside the building’ as opposed to out in the market. Furthermore, the story will end up in out there in the real world without a clear trail back to why you thought it was a good idea and a ready criteria for whether or not it’s delivering the outcome you intended.
This entry was posted in Business Foundations and tagged storyboarding on April 25, 2014by General Assembly.
By Steven Weiss
Steven Weiss is a web developer, technology enthusiast, and recent Web Development Immersive graduate. His former life was spent as a sound engineer for NPR and various voice over studios. When not coding, he is likely cooking and/or eating. In this blog, Steve takes us through the process of creating his app, On The Side, in our WDI course. This post originally appeared on Steve’s blog here.
My first app is out in the world, flying on its own little wings. It’s called On The Side, your source for restaurant recommendations based around a super cool and esoteric list of the best ingredients right now. But lets take a step back.
On The Side begins its life as the first project assignment for the General Assembly Jan’ 14 WDI class, a collective of 27 pirate like individuals from diverse backgrounds, all restarting their lives as web developers. It’s like a reality show, except thateveryone is there to make friends.
In 6 weeks, each of us has gone from little to no web development knowledge to building a fully functioning app. Once you beat yourself up over everything you’d like to improve or need to have a better handle on…it’s pretty exciting.
This entry was posted in Web Development and tagged api, application programming interface, programming, wdi, web development on April 24, 2014 by General Assembly.
Name: Matt and Katie Iles (@nine_lines)
Occupation: Co-Founders, Nine Lines
1. In 140 characters or less, what is Digital Marketing?
The pursuit to understand your customers, master your messaging, and grow your business.
2. What’s your favorite part about Digital Marketing? What gets you most excited?
The industry’s constantly changing, and we’re constantly learning. We love to experiment and analyze. But ultimately, we love growing companies. We see that aspect alone as vitally important and deeply fulfilling. With Digital Marketing, you can bring immediate value to the customer and to the business. What’s more exciting than that?
This entry was posted in Digital Marketing and tagged acquisition, digital, digital marketing, email, marketing, social media on April 22, 2014 by General Assembly.
Celine is the Founder of Le Design Team & Slow Factory and UX Design ImmersiveInstructor at GA in NYC. You can follow her on Twitter at @celinecelines. This post originally appeared on her blog here.
IF ANYTHING…
One thing I always say during my classes is “the design process is like LEGO—every step, every deliverable, every method is like a LEGO piece that you can use whenever, and in whichever, order you’d need to as you are moving forward from the Nebulous state of ideation towards prototype and tests.”
Teaching design to a group of professionals looking for a major career change often comes with the assumption that I will provide the secret recipe to the perfect website or service. I can only teach the method to go from the discovery phase all the way to prototyping ideas and testing them. Designers are like wizards—we can make sense of chaos. In his series COSMOS, Neil deGrasse Tyson says “we are all descendants of astronomers.” In essence, we all looked to the sky, made sense out of these patterns, and were able to find our way.
This entry was posted in User Experience Design on April 21, 2014 by General Assembly.
By Alex Cowan
Meet Alex Cowan, entrepreneur (5x), intrapreneur (1x), author, and instructor at General Assembly. He’s also the author of ‘Starting a Tech Business’. When he’s not teaching at GA, he’s often found advising companies and posting instructional materials for innovators and instructions on alexandercowan.com. In this first entry of his series on storyboarding posts, Alex lays out the basics and explains how storyboarding can help anyone, in any career path.
Communicating is hard and arguing is worse. And we’re probably much less effective communicators than we think — possibly as much as 20x less effective. In 1990 a Stanford researcher performed a study where on one party (“tapper”) tapped out a simple song a a counterparty (“listener”) tried to interpret the song. The tapper thought their listener had recognized the song 50% of the time where they’d actually only got it 2.5% of the time (this from the book ‘Made to Stick’). Unlike rhythmic tapping, storyboards inherently make us better communicators.
This entry was posted in Business Foundations, Miscellaneous and tagged brainstorm,communication, drafting, storyboard, storyboarding on April 18, 2014 by General Assembly.
Today we are announcing the pilot of a very exciting new program, which we are calling the Opportunity Fund. Our initial partners, Microsoft, Google, Hirepurpose and Nas (yes, the rapper), have all offered up generous scholarship funds to help veterans, women, and minorities become less underrepresented in the tech industry.
Ever since we founded General Assembly, we have held our community as the central element of our identity and values. As we’ve grown, our definition of community has expanded from NYC to other cities, and even to other continents. We have relentlessly pursued our mission to “create a global community of individuals empowered to pursue work they love,” but we know there’s a ton of work to do along the way.
This entry was posted in Miscellaneous, On Campus and tagged general assembly,minorities, scholarship, the opportunity fund on April 17, 2014 by General Assembly.
Like many other services across much of the internet, General Assembly was impacted by the major encryption vulnerability that was discovered last week. We took swift and immediate action to patch this vulnerability.
General Assembly is no longer vulnerable.
While we have no evidence of a security breach, we’ve logged you out of your GA account as a safety precaution. As such, you may be asked to login again when entering the GA site. We also highly recommend all our users to change their password, both at generalassemb.ly as well as other services. For more information on this vulnerability, known as “Heartbleed,” visit: http://heartbleed.com/.
This entry was posted in Miscellaneous and tagged heartbleed on April 15, 2014 by General Assembly.
Peter is the founder of Masters of the Leap where he works with young professionals who want more freedom, adventure, and purpose in their work lives. He is also an instructor at GA in San Francisco.
If you’re experiencing fatigue at least five days a week, hypersensitivity to everything office-related, including timecards and long meetings, and nausea at the thought of staying at your current job any longer… then you’re probably suffering from what I call a “corporate allergy.”
Unfortunately, this sort of allergy isn’t relieved so simply as popping a few Claritin. If you’re in this position, don’t worry (I’ve been there, and help clients through similar situations every day). It’s just time to get clear about what to do next.
This entry was posted in Business Foundations and tagged bft, business, ceo,entrepreneurship, leap, startup on April 14, 2014 by General Assembly.
Our friends Bjorn and Ting at Doorstep Studios have embarked upon a 4 month journey to connect with the makers, hackers, entrepreneurs and growing creative class of urban East Asia. In “Block 71,” they take us on a virtual tour of the startup scene in Singapore. This entry originally appeared on CreationCatalogue where you can follow along with their entire journey.
From the outside, Block 71 looks decidedly uninspiring: gaunt, gray, faceless walls of concrete standing over an asphalt tarmac. On this particular day, a desultory rain sprinkled the west side of Singapore, giving the scene a heightened sense of gloom and apathy.
This entry was posted in Miscellaneous and tagged asia, east asia, singapore, startups,tech scene on April 11, 2014 by General Assembly.