Mindset for achievement: How to boost achievement and fulfillment through mindset [and] Stone Knives, Bear Skins, and Greasemonkey: Tools for tearing down the wall between engineering and design

Mindset for achievement: How to boost achievement and fulfillment through mindset, Carol Dweck, Stanford

Mindset is a simple idea discovered by world-renowned Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck in decades of research on achievement and success—a simple idea that makes all the difference. In a fixed mindset, people believe their basic qualities, like their intelligence or talent, are simply fixed traits. They spend their time documenting their intelligence or talent instead of developing them. Dweck's research also shows that praising intelligence can harm motivation by creating a fixed mindset. People also tend to believe that talent alone creates success—without effort. They're wrong. In a growth mindset, people believe that their most basic abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work—brains and talent are just the starting point. This view creates a love of learning and a resilience that is essential for great accomplishment. Virtually all great people have had these qualities. Teaching a growth mindset creates motivation and productivity in the worlds of business, education, and sports.

Stone Knives, Bear Skins, and Greasemonkey: Tools for tearing down the wall between engineering and design, Kent Brewster, Netflix

Much as we love our comps, a working prototype simply can't be beaten for measuring user reaction to changes in interaction design. Time is short and stakes are high—especially when the intended audience includes members of your executive team—but support from engineering is hard to come by.

Kent will present a set of simple techniques and examples for making changes to web pages after they are rendered in the client's browser. While not ready for prime time, front-end hacks combined with publicly available services like Yahoo! Pipes and YQL can usually provide the missing link between the drawing board and engineering.

If you'd like to try it out, please bring your laptop with Firefox and Greasemonkey installed.