Sometimes building the better product isn’t what you need for success. Sometimes all you need is a little gimmick that works well enough to get users in the door, and then let the product keep them there. Read about Google Maps’ origin story, and how it took some luck and a fun gimmick to make it a success.

A mentor-in-a-book for developers of all levels that provides insight into those day-to-day, non-technical challenges and questions.

Netflix performance engineer Brendan Gregg gives a great talk on tunings they make to their EC2 instances to squeeze every ounce of performance out of them.

Happy Friday!