So! A lot of y’all went nuts when the newest pages dropped, and there were 500 references falling out of Spinel’s closet. Well, I’m telling you that there are 17 on the first page, and 11 on the second! If you want to try and find them all yourself, do so now.

If not, I have a cheet sheet below the cut!

But also know, not everything is a reference. On Page 1, none of the sports equipment, the elf girl with the necklace, the unicorn, and the bean are not references. Page 2, the sports equipment, starfish, and the wizard hat are not references. Other than that? Go nuts!

Quansheng UV K5

Getting a ‘quickie’ on Quickbooks time

How to Execute Common QuickBooks Tasks

When you’re working with QuickBooks, you will encounter command windows. To perform a common accounting or bookkeeping task in QuickBooks, use these commands. When QuickBooks displays the command’s window, you just fill in the boxes and press Enter.

To Do This Choose This QuickBooks’s Command Dealing with Customers   Invoice a customer Customers→Create…

Cheatsheet, MATH61, classmate.

Today's commandments come from our very own Social Media guru James (@ingenious_James). 

Pinterest is a bit of a strange platform. It's incredibly visual, incredibly viral, but it's often underused to its full potential, or misused - people choose to use it for the obvious tactic of using it as a virtual shop window. Which is fine. But there's so much more to it than that.

It's an important platform to get right - not only can it offer a completely new dimension to your business' social media and marketing strategies, it also happens to be the fastest-growing organic traffic generator out there, doubling its figures since May 2012, and now only behind Google, Direct Traffic & Facebook in terms of referral traffic. There are also stats out there to indicate that Pinterest users spend more per user than on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. But whilst it’s growing rapidly, there are still so many brands that aren't using the platform properly.

So, here are my 10 top considerations for the platform, which will hopefully provide you with food for thought and open your eyes to the vast potential that Pinterest offers to business.  1) It's not just for B2C companies. Feel like it's important to mention this first. As I mentioned above, each social media platform adds another dimension to your overall marketing strategy, and Pinterest is no different, irrespective of whether you're aiming at consumers or businesses.  2) Ensure you know what you want to achieve from the platform.  There's no point going into the platform blind. It will look like a mess, and reflect badly upon your business.  So, as you would with any marketing process, ascertain what it is that you want to achieve by being on there. Is it exposure? Website traffic? Leads and sales? Once you prioritise this, you'll find everything else fits into place a lot more easily. A focused marketing strategy is a good marketing strategy. 

3) Integrate it with your website. 

Pinterest gives you a lot of options with which to integrate your website to the platform. And multi-channel marketing is great for both brand identity and exposure.  If you visit http://pinterest.com/business/getstarted/, you'll come across the options to: a) Verify your website - vital for #6 below, and analysing what works to drive traffic to your site. b) Add a 'Pin It' button - which allows your content to easily be shared on Pinterest by other users. Great for businesses with loads of multimedia & visual content.  c) Add the Pinterest 'Bookmarket' - not vital, but allows you to pin items much more quickly.  d) Add a 'follow' button - which allows your customers easy access to your Pinterest activity.  They don't take long to install, they're pretty user-friendly, and are therefore a must-have to get the most from the platform.  4) Mix it up.  The best pinners are those who have a variety of different boards offering a variety of resources. Add videos (yes, you can do that on Pinterest), relevant articles/blog posts, infographics, competition posts from a variety of sources (your own as well as externally-sourced) on a variety of topics.  5) Link it up.  I've already stated the importance of integrating your Pinterest strategy with the rest of your marketing mix, but one way of directing traffic to certain areas of your site is by embedding links into your pins.  If you pin from the web, the link will already be embedded (changing the link from the parent site is awful Pinterest etiquette, and will make you very unpopular). But, if you're uploading pins from your computer - advised, because original pins tend to rank higher in Pinterest's search algorithms - then this needs to be done manually.  6) Analyse, analyse, analyse.  To begin with, social media is a bit about trial and error - meaning there's a bit of luck involved. As you develop, however, analytics software allows you to minimise the 'risk' factor involved, and Lady Luck with it, too.  Pinterest has its own analytics software (rolled out in early 2013), which is great for telling you what works, and what isn't working in your strategy. You can ascertain what to pin, what format it should be in, when it should be posted for optimal exposure/virality, and where it should be directed to on your site. This in turn will increase your exposure, leads and help your time-management too.  7) It's not a selling platform, but a social platform.  This goes for all social media platforms, but particularly for Pinterest, because it's fashioned so much to look like a shop window. The people who will get the most from the platform will be those who interact. So, share, like and comment on pins, repin (and credit) others, and be a social member of the community.  8) Express your business' personality.  On no other social platform I would argue that you get as much of an opportunity to showcase the inner workings of your business than on Pinterest. It's a veritable gold-mine of 'humanity', showing off personal creations, funny quotes and things everyone can relate to.  So, make the most of it. As I mentioned before, people buy from people, and this is a great way to show that your business, no matter how corporate, is run by people.  9) Use Rich Pins. If you are selling on Pinterest, these are an absolute no-brainer. They've recently been introduced to the platform, and if you're selling products, sharing recipes, or selling movies, they're a great way to a) stand out and b) provide loads more information than you'd otherwise be able to. They can integrate with your website, as well as review & selling websites (such as Etsy), and it makes it easy now for you to display prices too.  10) Make your images dynamic.  This, again, is for all those selling on the platform. Rather than just a standard shot, showcase your images in action. People can then visualise themselves using the product - and as any marketer knows, adding emotional appeal is 9/10ths of the way to pushing a customer along the marketing funnel - and also can see what their life will be like if they purchase it.

For the past several weeks I've been focusing my efforts on learning how to approach software architecture. Despite my experience in developing several applications, I wanted to read and learn more about this to do a better job in the future, for our upcoming project.

I've read some articles and a couple of books on this topic. My goal was to extract relevant pieces of knowledge with the final goal of producing one sheet of paper with the most important points. I wanted to stick it onto the wall behind my screen, so that I could refer to it with only a glance. It had to have the most important questions that I should ask myself before committing to anything important during software design.

Today, I finally condensed all I wanted to write, prepared this page, printed and glued it to the wall:

I've prepared a PDF that you can download and print to put in your workplace, if you like this.

Here are the points and their explanations:

Is this a "Good Idea"?

I took this one from: Avoid "Good Ideas"

The really insidious thing about "good ideas" is that they are "good." Everyone can recognize and reject "bad" ideas out of hand - It's the good ones that slip through and cause trouble with scope, complexity, and sheer wasted effort incorporating something into the application that isn't necessary to meet the business need.

In other words, think if this is actually necessary or is it just feature creep. Software complexity increases exponentially so having twice the features makes the code complicated by much more than twice.

DRY. Don't Repeat Yourself

DRY is a well-known software design principle. Explained in Pragmatic Programmers, it means that "Every piece of knowledge must have a single, unambiguous, authoritative representation within a system."

I already have an ingrained instinct about DRY. Still, I wanted to have a good in-the-face reminder so as not to forget it in a middle of a passionate idea.

Orthogonal?

In other words, how independent is this module or block from other parts of the system? Modularity in software is important. It makes life easier later. It's easy to understand and easy to overlook.

Testable?

Think how you will test this part of the system. Is it designed in such a way that makes testing easy? Testability depends on modularity, complexity, code style. Don't neglect testability of your system or code. Testing is important. Manual testing is good. Automatic testing is much better.

Is there another way?

This is also from Pragmatic Programmers. It contains good quotes in every chapter. Here's one by Emil-Auguste Chartier — “Nothing is more dangerous than an idea if it’s the only one you have.”

Often, when thinking about problems we come up with a solution and run to implement it, feeling happy that we have one. Unfortunately, often the first solution won't be the best. Think again, be creative, try a different approach. When you come up with more ideas, it will often be the case that the first one was too rushed and that the next ones are, in fact, much better.

Costs of changing this later

Consider the decision you're about to take. What will it cost you to change it at later stages of the project? Can you defer this decision? If you're not sure about the decision, can you design the system in such a way that changing it later will not break things and cause unnecessary work?

What if I didn't have this problem?

This one is from Don’t Be a Problem Solver.

Because architects tend to immediately enter problem-solving mode, we forget, or rather have never learned how, to interrogate the problem itself. We must learn, like a telephoto lens, to zoom in and zoom out, in order to ensure the question is really framed properly, and that we’re not merely accepting what we’re given.

Instead of immediately working to solve the problem as presented, see if you can change the problem. Ask yourself, what would the architecture look like if I just didn't have this problem? This can lead ultimately to more elegant and sustainable solutions.

What are facts and assumptions? Document rationale.

The last two are from Challenge assumptions - especially your own.

Best practices in software architecture state that you should document the rationale behind each decision that is made, especially when that decision involves a trade-off (performance versus maintainability, cost versus time-to-market, and so on)...

This practice is valuable because by way of listing these factors, it helps highlight assumptions that the architects may have that are affecting important decisions regarding the software that is being designed. Very often these assumptions are based on "historical reasons", opinion, developer lore, FUDs…

In other words, if you're designing software architecture, write down why specific decisions are made and then think what of these are facts and what are assumptions. Check your assumptions.

Facts and assumptions are the pillars on which your software will be built. Whatever they are, make sure the foundations are solid.

Download the PDF with these question to stick on your wall.