Asking questions leads to knowledge, not just about our population size or place of birth, but about every aspect of our lives. Surveys have grown to allow everyone to ask opinions on their products and services, from your local pet store to huge multinational corporations. This desire to use surveys to move forward started with the census.

A census is an amazing system

The history of surveys is essentially the history of the technology used to collect and interpret information. As tech has developed, so has our capacity to know ourselves on a large scale.<ul><li>The first mention of a census is in the Bible in the book of Exodus. </li><li>In Chinese mythology, you’ll find a census from 2000 years before the common era – the census of Yu the Great.</li><li>The Romans used a census throughout the Republican period and then into the empire, where they would use it to structure their society.</li></ul>

The history of surveys

During Roman times, censuses were taken on everything, from bundles of knotted thread to wax tablets. The information was engraved on stone. Eventually, the technology of paper transformed communication and record-keeping. But the problem with paper is that it comes large and unwieldy.  In the United States, the first census in 1790 asked basic questions such as sex, age, and race. But as the number of census questions became dramatically larger, they reached a crisis point where they needed to have a way of literally, physically manipulating this paper.

Paper census found inadequate

The 1880 census in the United States had an increasingly important role, for example, in determining how the political representation would be assigned. But with a growing population, the census was also growing, collecting more data than the government could tabulate or quickly process.A breakthrough in how all the data could be interpreted came when Charles Seaton, the Chief Clerk of the Census, invented the Seaton Device. It had a complicated system of rollers where you could take a wide sheet and roll it through these rollers so that two columns would appear side by side.

The Seaton Device

Herman Hollerith previously worked in the census office and experienced first-hand how broken the process of collecting, analyzing, and reporting on that data was. So he built a machine that counted the stored data at a far greater speed and with far higher accuracy than they’d been able to before. Hollerith’s machine was used in the 1890 census. In just two years, the job was done, saving the government $5 million. Hollerith began to see the potential for using the data on the cards for other information. He found adjacent businesses for the storage and tabulation of large data sets.

Herman Hollerith tabulating machine

Tristram Hooley, a professor at Inland Norway University, spend years running online surveys for businesses. He co-wrote a book, What is Online Research, in which the authors pinpoint the birth of the online survey. The first online survey was possibly in 1986 when they were doing a survey about surveys to figure out if it would work. From the 1990s, it became easier to access some subset of the general population through online surveys.  From the 2000s, you get things like Web 2.0 Technologies and SurveyMonkey. Today, almost every business has experimented with it in some way.

The birth of the online survey

The biggest challenge is to get people to fill them in. If you want to claim some sort of representativeness of what you are doing, you have to get the right people or the right spread of people to fill it in. Some surveys are not well made. For example, <ul><li>A business asks you something they should already know such as emailing a survey asking you for your email address.</li><li>They ask too many questions. Most people get bored after four or five questions. </li><li>Clicking on the survey link and it pops over a new window. You wanted to be in your email, not on another webpage.</li></ul>

Online survey challenges

You’ll get a better response rate and quality response if your survey is in context, asking customers questions about the thing they’re currently doing in your product. Surveys should reach users wherever they are, be that your web application or your mobile app, and they can also be sent via a link through an email or a push notification if needed.

Essentials of online surveys

Andrew Whitby, author of The Sum of the People: How the Census Has Shaped Nations, from the Ancient World to the Modern Age, gives insight into the history and uses of surveys.

A whistle-stop tour into the history of surveys - from the first mentions in the ancient worlds to the effortless, ubiquitous version we have today.Find out more about Intercom Surveys hereSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Technology & The Future

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Computer Science

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Podcasts

On Inside Intercom you'll hear the team from Intercom interview makers and do-ers from the worlds of product management, design, startups and marketing.

Inside Intercom

Questioning tech: The past, present, and future of survey tools

Emotional things happen at work every day. When faced with overbearing bosses, annoying colleagues, or comments that derail us, it’s not always easy to maintain our calm and composure. But showing poise in the face of difficult situations is an important skill to develop your executive presence. Should you find yourself suddenly set off at work, try one or more of these strategies to regain your calm.

Triggered At Work

When you’re in fight-or-flight mode, your breathing becomes irregular, fast, short, and shallow. Regulating it can be your first line of defense. Lengthen your exhales and focus on breathing from your belly. Inhale for a count of four and exhale for a count of eight. This slows down your heartbeat, stabilizes your blood pressure, and encourages full oxygen exchange, which is critical to the brain’s ability to function.

Take Deep Breaths

Do something to take the attention away from your strong emotion temporarily. Focus on another sensation in your body, such as the feeling of your weight pressing into your seat, wiggling each toe individually, or lightly rubbing your fingertips together to see if you can feel the ridges of your fingerprints.

Distract Yourself

Research shows that putting your feelings into words, or emotional labelling, can quickly reduce their grip on you and lessen your physiological distress. When you feel that emotional rush in a meeting, ask yourself, “What are two or three words that describe how I feel right now?”

Use Your Words

After the moment has passed, and when you have more time, process your feelings more fully alone or with someone you trust to determine the relative costs and benefits of expressing them. This will help you decide whether to share them more widely — either with your manager or with the person who triggered you.

Process Your Feelings

The above strategies will help you break free from an amygdala hijack and increase activation of your prefrontal cortex. But there may also be times, particularly in team meetings, when you’ll need to respond right away and won’t have a private moment to collect yourself.To prepare for these situations, come up with a couple of go-to lines that will allow you to quickly respond and buy yourself more time.

Be Ready with A Script

Emotional things happen at work every day. When faced with overbearing bosses, annoying colleagues, or comments that derail us, it’s not always easy to maintain our calm and composure. But showing poise in the face of difficult situations is an important skill to develop your executive presence. Should you find yourself suddenly set off at work, try one or more of these strategies to regain your calm Take deep breaths: When you’re in fight-or-flight mode, your breathing becomes irregular, fast, short, and shallow. Regulating it can be your first line of defense. Lengthen your exhales and focus on breathing from your belly. Inhale for a count of four and exhale for a count of eight. This slows down your heartbeat, stabilizes your blood pressure, and encourages full oxygen exchange, which is critical to the brain’s ability to function. Distract yourself: Do something to take the attention away from your strong emotion temporarily. Focus on another sensation in your body, such as the feeling of your weight pressing into your seat, wiggling each toe individually, or lightly rubbing your fingertips together to see if you can feel the ridges of your fingerprints. Use your words: Research shows that putting your feelings into words, or emotional labelling, can quickly reduce their grip on you and lessen your physiological distress. When you feel that emotional rush in a meeting, ask yourself, “What are two or three words that describe how I feel right now?” Don’t forget to process your feelings: After the moment has passed, and when you have more time, process your feelings more fully alone or with someone you trust to determine the relative costs and benefits of expressing them. This will help you decide whether to share them more widely — either with your manager or with the person who triggered you.

Understand yourself and those around you.

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Psychology

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Career

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Corporate Culture

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Mindfulness

How to Quickly Calm Down When You Get Triggered at Work

The relationship between a manager and their report is a two-way street: navigating the road falls on both parties. Some managers are easy to get along with, while others can feel near impossible. However, there are several strategies you can use to manage up:<ol><li>Leave your assumptions at the door.</li><li>Hone your delivery for communication that comes through clearly.</li><li>Boost your chances of hearing 'yes' to your ask.</li><li>Get comfortable with feedback.</li><li>Set the tone in your1:1s</li><li>Share your impact the right way.</li><li>Build lasting rapport and trust.</li></ol>

Managing up - How to manage your boss

The biggest reason people can't manage up is that they don't understand their boss's job. You only see a small part of what your manager does.<ul><li>Regularly align on these two questions: What is success for me personally? What is a win for my manager's team?</li><li>Show your work. It's about knowing what your boss wants, then ensuring that you provide them with a steady drumbeat of the things they care about.</li><li>Understand what is your manager's most urgent priorities, then adjust accordingly.</li><li>Focus on what's keeping your manager up at night and identify what you can take off their plate.</li></ul>

Leave your assumptions at the door

<ul>
<li>Open up about your "work love language." From early on, share with your manager what motivates and drives you, including what's important to you outside of work.</li>
<li>Observe how your manager listens and processes inputs. If he stops listening halfway through describing a problem, switch to your proposed solution first.</li>
<li>Calibrate to match your manager's involvement. Share your team's wins, and ask for feedback on challenges.</li>
<li>Communicate early and often.</li>
<li>Don't get stuck in your ways of doing things.</li>
<li>Focus on OKRs to ensure you know what's important to your manager.</li>
</ul>

Hone your delivery for communication

<ul><li>Leave some breadcrumbs. Don't hoard information until you feel you have all the answers. Anything complex needs multiple exposures for someone to internalise the concept.</li><li>Create a shared understanding of the problem. Share information you have and consider alternative paths.</li><li>Don't bury your requests. Write regular email updates, including project updates, team wins or personal progress. But don't mix requests in. Treat it separately.</li><li>Always do your homework. Include two or three options and create a table with pros and cons.</li><li>Keep communication open.</li></ul>

Boost your chances of hearing 'yes' to your ask

<ul>
<li>Feedback should be ongoing and not be left to a formal discussion during performance reviews.</li>
<li>Allow positive feedback to come through louder. When you receive constructive criticism, try to stomach it even if it first rings false.</li>
<li>Don't just try to please your boss. Push back if you believe it is in the company's best interest. If your manager dumps a task on you, mention all your other priorities on your plate and ask where this new task fall.</li>
<li>Train your manager on how to treat you. E.g. don't answer emails after 7 pm or at weekends.</li>
</ul>

Get comfortable with feedback

You likely got a regular 1:1 meeting with your manager. While they can feel more obligatory than critical, meetings are a powerful tool to build trust and up-levelling your impact. <ul><li>Ensure that the shared agenda and notes are pre-populated with topics you want to discuss plus necessary context.</li><li>Ask a new manager what they care most about, their biggest challenges, your role and responsibilities, and their pet peeves.</li><li>Give a bird's eye view before going deep on any topic.</li><li>Grade yourself on alignment. After a meeting, ensure you know what's top of mind for your manager.</li></ul>

Set the tone in your 1:1s

<ul>
<li>Give regular updates. Written asynchronous communication is vital in the remote world. Managers can read at their leisure and comment async rather than live discussions.</li>
<li>Send weekly "State of Me" emails to your boss. Share what you're doing, what you plan to do, and what you've done. Include current priorities, things on your mind, and blockers you need help with. Using a template can make it easier to digest.</li>
</ul>

Share your impact the right way

<ul><li>Build rapport. You don't have to be best friends to build rapport. However, show interest. Pick a few topics you feel are common ground, such as kids or a shared hobby.</li><li>Get tactical with building empathy. Assume positive intent. Check assumptions and ask questions to get clarity on how your manager is thinking. Summarise what you're learning to ensure you understand their point of view.</li><li>Understand that your manager is likely a mentor. They see the good and bad and provide guidance and direction. A sponsor can indirectly help you manage up. They see your potential and can sway a manager.</li></ul>

Build lasting rapport and trust

Top startup leaders share their best tips for managing up, including communication tactics, building trust, and goal setting with your manager. 

leadershipandmanagement

Leadership & Management

A Tactical Guide to Managing Up: 30 Tips from the Smartest People We Know

Judith Owigar co-founded Akirachix whose vision is to nurture generations of women who use technology to develop solutions for Africa. She also founded the Juakali workforce to address the challenge of growing youth unemployment and improve the livelihoods of skilled manual Labourers in Kenya. An accomplished speaker, she has spoken at the grace hopper celebration of women in computing as well as the global Entrepreneurship summit. She has been recognized with numerous awards and Honours including Anita Borg change agent award in 2012,

At First, I Was Obsessed With All The News Coming In

7:30 Wake up8:00 Go for a run / do a home work out / read a book9:00 Breakfast and social media10:00 Shower10:30 Work/ Calls13:00 Social media break / have a snack or lunch14:00 Work / Calls16:00 Lunch / Dinner / Watch news18:00 Work or reading19:00 Downtime22:00 / 23:00 Sleep

What does a “typical” day look like to you?

At first, I was obsessed with all the news coming in but that was making me more anxious and I found it difficult to get anything done. I’m definitely slower when it comes to responding to requests. In the theme of being kind to myself, I don’t beat myself up about it. My target is usually to get one thing done or even started, then to add on it as I go forward. I also check in more (than I would ordinarily) with family and friends in order to give me peace of mind.&nbsp;

How has Coronavirus impacted your life/work?

<ul><li>I keep a diary of tasks to be achieved each day. A paper diary — I get great satisfaction from crossing things off my list.</li><li>All my meetings and calls are put on my online calendar that is linked to my phone, with a 30-minute reminder in case I forgot about the meeting and I need time to prepare or change location.</li><li>I have different music playlists that I can play depending on my mood.</li></ul>

What productivity tips have you found useful whilst working from home?

1.&nbsp;<a href='https://www.amazon.com/Hard-Thing-About-Things-Building/dp/0062273205/' class="idea-content-link" target='_blank' rel="noreferrer">The Hard Thing About Hard Things </a> <a href='https://medium.com/u/926899f38323?source=post_page-----2e851f819483--------------------------------' class="idea-content-link" target='_blank' rel="noreferrer">Ben Horowitz</a>2.&nbsp;<a href='https://www.amazon.com/Zero-Notes-Start-Ups-Build-Future/dp/0753555204/' class="idea-content-link" target='_blank' rel="noreferrer">Zero to One </a>3.&nbsp;<a href='https://www.amazon.com/Subtle-Art-Not-Giving-Counterintuitive/dp/0062457713/' class="idea-content-link" target='_blank' rel="noreferrer">The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck </a>4.&nbsp;<a href='https://www.amazon.com/Brave-Not-Perfect-Fear-Bolder/dp/1524762334/' class="idea-content-link" target='_blank' rel="noreferrer">Brave Not Perfect</a> <a href='https://medium.com/u/530615ef05ff?source=post_page-----2e851f819483--------------------------------' class="idea-content-link" target='_blank' rel="noreferrer">Reshma Saujani</a>5.&nbsp;<a href='https://www.amazon.com/Finding-Keeping-Love-Imago-Based-Program/dp/B00NUD3YHU/' class="idea-content-link" target='_blank' rel="noreferrer">Finding and Keeping Love </a>

What five books would you recommend during this time at home?

There will definitely be more space and appreciation for digital solutions that support remote and flexible working. Hopefully, this will go hand in hand with more sustainable support work benefits, insurance policies, bank solutions, childcare solutions for remote/day workers because that is what the future of work will look like.

When this is all over, what will the opportunities look like?

This is the sixth interview in the Beyond Work series looking at how founders and innovators work from home during the global pandemic of Coronavirus. In this interview, we head to Kenya and to talk…

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Entrepreneurship

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Startups

The race to get the world’s first plane in the sky was a hard-fought battle between The Wright Brothers and a lesser-known gentleman by the name of Samuel Pierpont Langley. The world knows about the Wright brothers but the outspoken Pierpont Langley, who no one knows about, was about to take the honours of building the flying machine if he had kept quiet.

Why you shouldn’t share your goals

Early praise can leave the individual receiving the praise feeling like he or she has already won… in turn causing them to be less likely to follow through with their goals.When we openly share our goals, we experience <a href="https://www.jotform.com/blog/397-Why-setting-big-goals-can-make-you-miserable">a feeling of success that normally only takes place upon completion of the goal</a>.The result? We don’t ever actually pursue the goal.

Premature Feeling Of Achievement

<ul><li>Embrace fear-setting over goal-sharing.</li><li>Surround yourself with competition.</li></ul>By simply showing up and placing yourself in a competitive environment, you will be more likely to push harder and show up more often — two factors that can help your reach your goals.

Alternative Approaches

The race to get the world’s first plane in the sky was a hard fought battle between The Wright Brothers and a lesser-known gentleman by the name of Samuel Pierpont Langley. As you probably read…

<ul><li>DNS stands for “Domain Name System” and it’s a backbone technology that makes the world wide web possible. </li><li>At the most basic level DNS provides a key/value lookup from a domain name (e.g., google.com) to an IP address (e.g., 85.129.83.120), which is required in order for your computer to route a request to the appropriate server. </li><li>Analogizing to phone numbers, the difference between a domain name and IP address is the difference between “call John Doe” and “call 201-867–5309.” Just like you needed a phone book in the old days, you need DNS to look up the IP address for a domain. </li></ul>

They’re the magic sauce that makes scaling horizontally possible. They route incoming requests to one of many application servers that are typically clones/mirror images of each other and send the response from the app server back to the client. Any one of them should process the request the same way so it’s just a matter of distributing the requests across the set of servers so none of them are overloaded.

Load Balancer

At a high level, web application servers are relatively simple to describe. They execute the core business logic that handles a user’s request and sends bac HTML to the user’s browser. To do their job, they typically communicate with a variety of backend infrastructures such as databases, caching layers, job queues, search services, other microservices, data/logging queues, and more. As mentioned above, you typically have at least two and often times many more, plugged into a load balancer in order to process user requests.

Web Application Servers

Every modern web application leverages one or more databases to store information. Databases provide ways of defining your data structures, inserting new data, finding existing data, updating or deleting existing data, performing computations across the data, and more.In most cases the web app servers talk directly to one, as will the job servers. Additionally, each backend service may have it’s own database that’s isolated from the rest of the application.

Database Servers

A caching service provides a simple key/value data store that makes it possible to save and lookup information in close to O(1) time. Applications typically leverage caching services to save the results of expensive computations so that it’s possible to retrieve the results from the cache instead of recomputing them the next time they’re needed. An application might cache results from a database query, calls to external services, HTML for a given URL, and many more.

Caching Service

<ul><li>Job queues store a list of jobs that need to be run asynchronously. The simplest are first-in-first-out (FIFO) queues though most applications end up needing some sort of priority queuing system. Whenever the app needs a job to be run, either on some sort of regular schedule or as determined by user actions, it simply adds the appropriate job to the queue.</li><li>Job servers process jobs. They poll the job queue to determine if there’s work to do and if there is, they pop a job off the queue and execute it. </li></ul>

Job Queue & Servers

It leverages an inverted index to quickly look up documents that contain the query keywords.The most popular Full-Text search platform today is Elasticsearch though there are other options such as Sphinx or Apache SOLR. Full-text search leverages an inverted index to quickly look up documents that contain the query keywords.

Full-text Search Service

Once an app reaches a certain scale, there will likely be certain “services” that are carved out to run as separate applications. They’re not exposed to the external world but the app and other services interact with them.

Services

Today, companies live and die based on how well they harness data. Almost every app these days, once it reaches a certain scale, leverages a data pipeline to ensure that data can be collected, stored, and analyzed. A typical pipeline has three main stages:<ol><li>The app sends data, typically events about user interactions, to the data “firehose” which provides a streaming interface to ingest and process the data. </li><li>The raw data as well as the final transformed/augmented data are saved to cloud storage. </li><li>The transformed/augmented data is often loaded into a data warehouse for analysis. </li></ol>

Data

The technology provides a way of serving assets over the web much faster than serving them from a single origin server. It works by distributing the content across many "edge" Servers around the world. In general a web App should always use a CDN to serve CSS, Javascript, images, videos.

11. CDN

And that’s a wrap on Web Architecture 101. I hope you found this useful. I’ll hopefully post a series of 201 articles that provide deep dives into some of these components over the course of the next year or two.

Parting thoughts

The above diagram is a fairly good representation of our architecture at Storyblocks. If you’re not an experienced web developer, you’ll likely find it complicated. The walk through below should make…

Web Architecture 101

The term Software Engineer refers to a person writing quality software as their profession.While anyone can learn to program and create a program that solves their specific problem, it's not the same as engineered programs.Engineering software is about designing, writing, testing, and maintaining computer programs that solve the problem for many users in different environments, machines and at different time zones.

Programmer vs software engineer

Software engineers are concerned with solving problems. It involves more than just writing programs. Some problems can be solved with existing programs or by using multiple programs. Complex problems may require writing multiple programs.&nbsp; Before writing a program, a software engineer needs to consider the following:<ul><li>What problems am I trying to solve?</li><li>What else besides writing code can be done to solve them?</li><li>What can I do to make these problems easier to solve with code?</li></ul>

Software engineers are solution-oriented

Some people don’t like the term Software Engineer because of the engineering metaphor. This article is not about that term. If you don’t like it you can substitute it with Software Author, Software…

Software Engineering is different from Programming

Taking time away to relax, reflect, and recharge comes with several benefits. Yet there are times when your vacation ends but your motivation to dive back into work doesn’t follow. If you work remotely, it may be particularly difficult to get back into your routine, because you’re not around other people who have been working steadily while you were away.

Going Back To Work After Vacation

Vacations take you out of the office, and that creates physical and mental distance from your work.When it comes to working, distance is a double-edged sword. It can help you think about your priorities, but it can also make the volume of what you have to accomplish seem insurmountable. If you have a big project to complete, you may find it difficult to see how you’ll actually get it done. That means you need to turn the abstract task into specific steps you can complete. Go back to your to-do list and dedicate specific times to addressing particular components of the bigger project.

The Mountain Seems too High to Climb

When you go on vacation, you realign your priorities. When you get back to the workplace, you may need to convince yourself that the collection of tasks you’re doing is worth the effort. Take the time to look at the work you’ve done. What are the big-picture things you’ve accomplished? The real sense of mission in your work comes from that combination of seeing how the tasks you perform are connected to a more significant set of outcomes.

Nothing Seems That Important

Even if you believe deeply in the mission behind the work you’re doing, you might still have trouble getting back into your work after taking time off. It may be that you’re just bored with the set of tasks you’re performing.Work on concepts like <a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-017-9088-8_16" target="_self">flow</a> suggests that people are most engaged with their work when they’re working right at the limit of what they’re capable of doing, and where each action succeeds and naturally leads to the next. If you’re not getting this sense of daily engagement, the job you’re in may no longer be a challenge for you.

When You’re Stuck in a Rut

Three ways to get back in the groove when you’re just not feeling it.

Questioning tech: The past, present, and future of survey tools

How to Quickly Calm Down When You Get Triggered at Work

A Tactical Guide to Managing Up: 30 Tips from the Smartest People We Know

At First, I Was Obsessed With All The News Coming In

Why you shouldn’t share your goals

Lindsey Holmes