Friday footnotes is a weekly list of links related to product management and design in the ‘internet of public service’ curated by @jukesie

[1] Being secure and agile is a slide deck by Michael Brunton-Spall where he makes the argument that done right agile development leads to more secure applications that traditional methods produced. I look forward to the follow up blogpost (hint/hint) as this is a topic close to my heart!

[2] The strengths and shortcomings of Rich Text, Plain Text and Markdown from the iA Writer team. Now iA Writer was my once and likely future test editor of choice and there is no doubt they have skin in the game when writing about this topic but it is a great piece nonetheless. It is worth it just for the view of M$ Word ‘under the bonnet’!

[3] It’s ok to think out loud about organisational culture by Giles Turnbull is a quick follow up to the previous linked post about the ‘It’s OK..’ poster GDS did. This is Giles talking a little about how that came about and the role of it in the wider work of cultural change.

[4] Tough News: We’ve Made 10 Layoffs written by Joel Gascoigne, the CEO of Buffer this is an ultra-transparent insight in to why Buffer have had to make 10 staff redundant and make a lot of other cuts across the board after coming to terms with the fact they had made some poor decisions as they scaled. very interesting though it feels a little like rubber necking.

[5] Engineering interviews: what we (Medium) don’t screen for is part of a series of posts from Jamie Talbot about the new approach to technical hiring that Medium are implementing — it is all good stuff but this post is particularly interesting. The things that won’t be used to ‘sift’ CVs are (in this case) more insightful than the things they are looking for.

[6] Storytelling through blogging: everyone has a part to play has Amy McNichol blogging about blogging but I will forgive it on this occasion 🙂 While I don’t always agree with what seems like a slightly overly structured and formalised approach to blogging that GDS push I am always to support more blogging, more openness, more sharing.