Rdio Blog

Rdio keeps things simple with regular features that include artist spotlights, playlists, and music recommendations, along with occasional company updates. Check out their New Music Tuesday series to stay ahead of the trends.

Signal vs. Noise

Billed as a “design and usability blog,” 37signals’ blog provides a transparent look into the company’s work process, employees, and products. Check out posts like Why attacking application exceptions is important, Let’s get honest about uptime, and Stop whining and start hiring remote workers for a sense of the SVN style.

Gmail Blog

One of our goals this year is to use the Knewton blog to keep our audience in the loop about product updates and improvements.  With plenty of screen shots and visuals along with concise text explanations, Gmail’s blog posts serve as a great model for how to publicize product updates to a general audience.

Evernote Blog

The Evernote Blog does a good job of using one blog for multiple purposes. The category search feature is front and center, allowing readers to choose between sections like “product updates,” “tips & stories,” and “podcasts,” depending on their interests. If you’re a company looking to highlight the diverse ways in which your customers use your products, be sure to check out the “tips & stories” section for ideas.

Twitter Blog

From tips on how to use Twitter to engage in politics and sports, to information on cool new projects like embeddable tweets and the Twitter Translation Center, the Twitter blog provides a compelling high-level look at product updates as well as company goals and going-ons.

In Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology, education professors Allan Collins and Richard Halverson tackle the fraught issue of what it means to be an educated person in today’s society: “Deeply embedded in the culture of schooling is the notion that students should read, listen to, and absorb a large body of facts, concepts, procedures, theories, beliefs, and works of art and science that have accumulated over the centuries. An educated person is one who understands and appreciates these great intellectual products of human history.”

Why exactly is this so important? One of the hallmarks of an educated person is the ability to “think independently”; and how can one do this without access to a broad repository of skills and knowledge? This is why, when tests are given, students are generally not permitted to use outside resources. We test to make sure students are indeed accumulating and retaining knowledge as they progress from grade to grade. All this has economic ramifications as well. As a society, we tend to pay people well if they can be trusted to exercise independent judgment derived from a broad perspective and knowledge base. To some extent, one can only do this if he rises “above” his immediate environment and possesses some abstract understanding of the world (a grasp of patterns and structures) that transcends the day-to-day, tangible reality of his life.

Just-in-case vs. just-in-time learning. In contrast, the kind of learning that is typically associated with technology is a much more informal, hands-on sort with a more immediate application. Need to learn how to do something on your computer? Look it up on Google or tap into the right social media networks. Need to send an email to several hundred people? Find a service that handles it efficiently and that allows you to do A/B testing on the subject line. In other words, as Collins and Halverson encapsulate it, school fosters “just-in-case learning” while technology fosters “just-in-time learning.”

One of the biggest misconceptions today is that the new emphasis on technology in schools and popular culture will erode the traditional liberal arts education and reorient school so that it favors vocational, practical training (“just-in-time” knowledge) instead. In other words, some fear that technology integration will have students learning the latest trends and techniques instead of studying the classics and deep disciplinary knowledge.

The truth? There is no golden past. It is true that today’s schools face a number of contemporary problems (financial pressure, increased diversity of students, a peer and pop culture that undervalues school, just to name a few), but notions of a “golden past” of liberal arts education are generally false. Whether we realize it or not, many of us believe that one or two centuries ago, students were smarter, more disciplined, and better versed in the classics. In her groundbreaking book DIY: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education, Anya Kamenetz investigates the myth and asserts that there is “no vanished tradition of serious scholarship.” In fact, classes in pre-Civil War era colleges were often no more than bland, inaccurate, and cursory treatments of the achievements of Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle.

If you are passionate about serious intellectual inquiry, there has never been a better time in which to live. Technology has the potential to completely revitalize traditional liberal arts education. In the years to come, “just in case” and “just in time” learning will fuse and transform each other.

Here are just a few of the ways technology can make students more intellectual:

1. As technology grows more and more sophisticated, we can bring intellectual products of human history to life.

For a literary example (albeit not an entirely successful one), check out Arden’s interpretation of the life and times of William Shakespeare. For examples of computer games that are both entertaining and analytically challenging and can be used to supplement traditional lecture style classes, check out games like Civilization and Pirates. Both games allow students to tinker with variables in different historical systems and continuously observe the outcomes of their decisions. Because computers can provide instantaneous feedback, they lend themselves naturally to helping students develop systemic understanding of different subjects. Why are systems so important? Because no matter what the subject (whether it’s English, math or science), real mastery depends on understanding how details fit into the whole.

For more on how games can be introduced in classrooms as sophisticated texts to critique, check out my post on how to design an educational game.

2. Reading, writing, and research will be enhanced in dazzling ways.

Read an article three years ago that you only vaguely remember and suddenly have use for? Wrote a paper in college and want to recall your research process? In the future, students will be able to read, process, and share information like never before. Applications such as Diigo and Evernote already allow us to bookmark, annotate, and archive websites and share our findings with followers.

With these and other new services, students will be able to track their work over the years and build continuously on their existing scholarship. Gone will be the days when students feel like work is arbitrary and there is no continuity from year to year.

For more on the importance of instilling in students a sense of continuity, check out my series on why students don’t like school.

3. Using an adaptive learning engine, students can ramp up quickly to expert work.

The faster students see their efforts pay off, the more invested they will be in school work. Using big data and personalized recommendations, an adaptive learning engine will help students experience academic breakthroughs and epiphanies swiftly. It will provide challenges at a well-calibrated pace that hooks students on learning for life.

4. Using personalized systems and online communities, students can develop tastes for intellectual products and explore niche interests like never before.

Develop a taste for an obscure poet? Want to access out-of-print books? Or explore a thesis on an indie filmmaker? With companies like Amazon and Netflix, students can now take their most personal intellectual interests to unprecedented heights. And, as big data and personalization become increasingly important, we will see more ways in which people can explore their interests. Imagine, for instance, a Pandora-type system for poetry and visual art.

In what other ways do you envision technology changing education? 

Jose discussed the Knewton platform (what TechCrunch calls “personalized education on steroids”), along with a blog post he wrote for the WEF Forum Blog with some simple words of wisdom for entrepreneurs and VCs alike.

His advice?  ”Aim big. Go after a giant problem, one of the great problems of our time,  a problem that, if solved, would usher in an era of large-scale transformation across industries and nations.”

A problem, that is, like education.

If it seems daunting, it is. But as Peter Thiel, one of the VCs at Founders Fund (a Knewton investor) puts it, “People do the same old thing because they think it’s less risky. We think it’s actually riskier to do the same thing as everybody else. It’s risky to be a lemming.”

Check out the interview for more:

For a behind-the-scenes look at Jose’s time in Davos, check out this awesome comic strip. Here’s a preview (click the image to see more):

Join us! Get the event details here.

Recently, I took a dive through my inbox and resurrected these gems:

THE FELLOWSHIP OF KNEWTON

THE KNEWTON NETWORK

Here’s just a taste of what folks at Knewton have on their shelves these days:

1. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

David Ingber, Master Teacher

“I find myself unable to read as many pages in one setting as I used to. That’s why I’m almost glad that I ride the subway – it’s at least an hour a day that I can’t be distracted by the internet and my phone.”

2. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

Will Fleiss,  Senior Marketing Associate

If you love gripping young adult novels (think The Giver) and muse about the effects of pop culture and entertainment on society, don’t miss this story about child gladiators.

3. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace and The Great Shark Hunt: Gonzo Papers Volume 1 by Hunter Thompson

Jayson Phillips, Software Engineer

“It’s (Infinite Jest) a pretty meaty book and makes for a challenging yet enjoyable read.”

“From what I gather via conversation and observation – the reading culture is pretty alive and very diverse. People seem to be reading all the time and in many different genres/forms.”

4. The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal by Ben Mezrich

Andy Huang, Content Developer

If you enjoyed Bringing Down the House (the inspiration behind the Kate Bosworth movie 21) be sure to check out what Kevin Spacey calls the next addition to Mezrich’s formidable canon of “lad lit.”

5. Maverick: The Success Story Behind the World’s Most Unusual Workplace by Ricardo Semler; VALIS by Phillip K. Dick; The Pale King by David Foster Wallace; and Purely Functional Data Structures by Chris Okasaki

Trevor Smith, Software Engineer

6. Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey: The River of Doubt by Candice Millard

Charlie Harrington, Business Development Associate

During the perilous journey chronicled by Millard in this non-fiction thriller, three men died and Roosevelt himself was brought to the brink of suicide. For a taste of this adventure story, check out Charlie’s favorite quote from the book:

“Far from its outward appearance, the rain forest was not a garden of easy abundance, but precisely the opposite. Its quiet, shaded halls of leafy opulence were not a sanctuary but, rather, the greatest natural battlefield anywhere on the planet, hosting an unremitting and remorseless fight for survival that occupied every single one of its inhabitants, every minute of every day. Though frequently impossible for a casual observer to discern, every inch of space was alive – from the black, teeming soil under Roosevelt’s boots to the top of the canopy far above his head – and everything was connected. A long, linked mat of fungi under the soil consumed the dead and fed the living, completing an ever-changing cycle of remarkable life and commonplace death which had throbbed without pause for millions of years – and of which Roosevelt and his men, knowingly or not, had now become a part.”

7. Swann’s Way: In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust and Strong Motion by Jonathan Franzen

Hyunjin Kim, Associate Product Manager

Hyunjin’s two cents on reading in the age of tech:

“I think it’s becoming increasingly easier to become used to digesting information in smaller bits (from short articles to <140 twitter blasts), which, while useful for certain types of information/communication, often precludes (or make it more difficult to want to seek out) substantial analysis and engagement with thoughts, arguments, and issues.”

8. Zone One by Colson Whitehead

Nina Reed, Research Coordinator

Be sure to check out this post-apocalyptic Zombie horror novel, which GQ describes as “glory, lyrical” and “human” if brainy thrillers and full-throttle prose are your thing

9. Green Eggs & Ham by Dr. Seuss

Eric Garside, Software Engineer

10. The Queer Art of Failure by Judith Halberstam

Christina Yu, Marketing Associate

If you want a serious academic treatment of Little Miss Sunshine, Pixar movies, and Spongebob SquarePants; or if you’re ever given serious thought to what it feels like to come in 4th place at the Olympics, check out this witty treatise on the art of failure, forgetting, and passivity.

One of many insightful moments from the book:

“For Walter Benjamin… the cartoons depict a realist–though not naturalist–expression of the circumstances of modern daily life; the cartoons make clear that even our bodies do not belong to us–we have alienated them in exchange for money, or have given parts of them up in war. The cartoons expose the fact that what parades as civilization is actually barbarism. And the animal-human beasts and spirited things insinuate that humanism is nothing more than an ideology.”

What are you reading? Let us know in the comments!

Our first stop is Carnegie Mellon, which just happens to be the alma mater of two of Knewton’s greatest data scientists. We made a short video about how George and Jesse’s experiences in Pittsburgh helped shape their careers as Knerds. Take a look, and meet George in the flesh at our campus Knerd Talk on January 25!

Check out the Facebook event for the details.

Hiring great engineers is really hard. In his book, Smart and Gets Things Done, Joel Spolsky estimates great engineers are actively looking for work 4 times throughout their careers. The only time you’re guaranteed that great engineers are actively looking is when they’re in college.

By hiring Interns, you’re hoping to find the next great engineer before someone else does.

Before we get into the mechanics of hiring interns, let’s establish that this is a give and take relationship. There is some work you’ll need to do with interns, but you’ll also get plenty in return.

You will need to mentor your interns to:

• work on a team
• create production quality code
• be self sufficient. Show them that all the answers are in the machine sitting in front of them

In return, you get:

• a pipeline for filling future engineering positions
• practice for yours and your team’s mentoring skills
• some work done by a fresh, eager engineer
• to learn a few things yourself

How to recruit

There are 3 common ways to recruit interns: setting up or using an internship program, going through campus career centers or going through faculty to find their best students.

1. Setup or use an internship program

   Interns that came through internship programs helped drop all of our base page load times under 1 second through instrumentation and MySQL configuration improvements. We’ve also had interns help drastically reduce administrative times for our content developers by improving page load through SQL query optimization and adding bulk update features.

   Internship programs typically use some prestige to attract top students to apply.Some NYC specific examples of internship programs are the NYC Turing Fellows and Hack NY.

   You can also setup your own, like FogCreek has done and pointing listings on Craigslist to your internship program.

2. Go to the career center

   We found one intern through an on-campus recruiting trip up to Harvard. He setup a state-of-the-art code, build and release system using GIT, Gerrit and Jenkins, which we’ve subsequently ported our code to.

   Pick the top schools that you’re interested in recruiting from. If you’re not sure, look at the US News & World Reports rankings, or where most of your team is from.

   Post your open engineering internships to the career center, schedule on-campus interviews and infosessions, or attend a career fair.

   Over time, you’ll begin to develop a taste for how hard it is to recruit interns from certain schools and which schools seem to attract the interns that end up being the most productive for your needs.

   I’ve had mixed results with career fairs. Generally, my return has been better at on-campus interviews and through job postings than at career fairs.

3. Contact Faculty

   I hired an intern who designed and implemented our highest converting trial to buy flow for nearly 18 months by simply letting an assistant dean know I was looking for interns. He let some of his top students know we were looking.

   To contact faculty, use the list of target schools and your alumni network to locate faculty you’re interested in speaking to. Send them an e-mail, tell them what you’re working on and ask if they’d be willing to connect you to their top CS students.

Hiring Process

1. Review and sort resumes as normal

   Your resume sorting process should be the same as the one you use to hire full-time engineers — unless your normal screening process screens out anyone with fewer than 5 years of experience.

2. Interview remotely

   Make sure your team is capable of interviewing remotely. We typically use Skype and Etherpad for engineering interviews. Your interviews should be similar to what you use for full-time engineers — you may want to skip questions about development process (test first, source code management, etc.)

3. Pay them

   Your interns are going to do real work, you should pay them for it. Most internships seem to pay between $3,500 and $5,000/year.

4. Close on-site

   Once you’ve narrowed down your finalists, bring the ones you’d like to make an offer to on-site. Sell them on the company and your location. Make sure they would enjoy spending the summer at your location. Take them out for lunch or dinner with the team. These are valuable resources and the best ones will have multiple offers; convince them your company is right for them.

What to do once they accept

1. Help them find a place to live

   If your interns don’t live in your city, find them a comfortable, affordable place to live. In NYC, NYU housing is a good option.

2. Give them REAL work to do

   Don’t give your interns a side project that you don’t care about. Give them something that needs to get done this summer. Give them something that the rest of the team would need to deliver if the intern wasn’t there. Assigning an intern unimportant side-projects that the rest of the team doesn’t care about will result in an unproductive internship for both you and the intern.

 As a reminder, here are all the things interns at Knewton have completed:

• upgraded our build and release process
• produced our top converting landing page
• improved site performance
• became my first hire at Knewton (8 years after he interned for me)

Go hire interns … get tomorrow’s great engineers today

Great interns will become great engineers one day. If you find the right interns, take the time to mentor them, and give them an opportunity finish a project that matters. Maybe one day they’ll be a valuable full-time engineer.

If you’re an intern looking for a job, Knewton is hiring interns! Click here to apply.

Those who work in technology will be familiar with the term, “agile development.” Formally introduced in 2001 through the Manifesto for Agile Software Development, “agile development” is a method that promotes an iterative, flexible, and “time-boxed” approach to product development (as opposed to “waterfall development” which is traditionally associated with a slower and more bureaucratic approach). According to those who created the methodology, the result of embracing agile development is an emphasis on rapid execution as well as collaboration, self-organization, and personal responsibility.

Iterations, one or two or three week cycles, are the product of this methodology. For several years now, two-week iterations have functioned as the backbone of our work here at Knewton. Here’s why they work for us:

1. Our iterations sync everyone in the company.

While we work hard to keep everyone in the company updated through brownbag lunches and presentations, functioning under the same scheduling framework helps us understand each other better and get in the same mindset. Iterations serve this purpose. Here at Knewton, you’ll hear people say things like, “I have 2 days on my iteration to finish the Q/A” or “I have 3.5 days to get that rev done.” Within the context of iterations, this sort of communication works well; it lets others know the priority of a given item of work within someone’s overall schedule, when the work will be done, how long it will take, etc.

The result? Faster execution, more informed decisions, better collaboration, and less time spent on unnecessary emails and meetings. After all, speed is important at any start-up, and part of what makes speed possible is exceptional trust and communication.

2. Iterations are long enough.

2 weeks or 10 business days is enough time to get some significant work done so that meetings to discuss the previous iteration and plan the next one are actually productive and are based on real work — not just plans to get work done.

3. Iterations are short enough that everyone can feel the “pulse.”

At the same time, iterations are short enough so that we can address problems quickly and nip them in the bud. Iterations, in other words, allow us to adjust quickly and respond to changes in the road-plan while maintaining a sense of order and accountability.

4. Iterations allow for more autonomy and deeper engagement.

At Knewton, we don’t micro-manage each other. While we might have stand-ups regularly (meetings so short we don’t need to sit down), it’s not so much to micro-manage our use of time but rather, to collaborate, reflect on process and touch base. While our work is intense, iteration scheduling makes us feel in control, so that we know what to expect in at least 10-day cycles. We can plan ahead, things don’t feel arbitrary, and we get the feeling that our colleagues respect our time.

This sense of autonomy is important–it promotes accountability (the idea that you’re personally responsible for meeting certain deadlines) and transparency (clarity about what’s going on where) which ultimately boosts engagement and motivation because we can see precisely and tangibly how our individual efforts are paying off.