An Artist’s Journey with Code

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Matthew Epler is a creative technologist based in Brooklyn, NY.

Matthew Epler is a creative technologist specializing in creating one-of-a-kind interactive projects with an emphasis on the Internet of Things. 

His work, which blends digital and physical design practices with computer programming, has been featured in museums and a variety of media outlets around the world including The Milan Triennale Museum of Design, mudac Lausanne, and on Wired, Huffington Post, Newsweek, Reuters, Vice, and Creative Applications.

Some of his most well-known pieces include the Netflix Switch, Levi’s Station to Station, Grand Old Party, and Big Bats

Matthew describes himself as a designer who can code, and a coder who can work with his hands. Read on to see how learning to code transformed his passion for art and film into a thriving career in creative technology. Continue reading

How to Define “Brand”

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When we deliver the Digital Marketing class at General Assembly, we start off with branding. Not digital branding — just branding. Digital marketing is, after all, still marketing, and in order to market effectively, you must first define your brand.

Early in the very first day of Digital Marketing, we ask the class to define the word “brand,” and then we offer up several other definitions from people who are much smarter and much more experienced than I am.

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5 TED Talks to Help You Discover Your Passion

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Are you finding it hard to finally resolve to do something new in your career in 2016? Maybe you’re starting the year bogged down in endless work that you don’t enjoy. Or maybe you’re dealing with something more permanent, and you feel like you’ve lost an important spark in your career development.

Regardless of your situation, it’s important to take a step back and remember: everyone goes through these dips and spikes in their careers. Even more? The power is in your hands to course-correct and find the right path forward.

You need inspiration. But contrary to the popular saying, inspiration doesn’t just ‘strike.’ You need to go out and find it. Get in the right mindset for 2016 with the following TED talks.

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What It Means to Be Data Literate

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The Data Journalists handbook defines data literacy as, “the ability to consume for knowledge, produce coherently and think critically about data.” It goes on to say that “data literacy includes statistical literacy but also understanding how to work with large data sets, how they were produced, how to connect various data sets and how to interpret them.”

At General Assembly, we’d like to imagine a world where you don’t need a Ph.D. in Statistics to have a data-informed conversation about your business, your health, or your life in general. Over the past year, we’ve embarked on the journey to build a more data literate world through education offerings that meet the diverse needs of our students.

In building these courses, we’ve sought advice from data scientists, analysts, and hiring managers to determine the critical skills you need to become data literate in today’s workforce. We discovered that it isn’t just a concrete list of skills, but a mindset geared towards data—a way of approaching problems beyond “gut instincts.” 

Here, we’ve proposed a few simple questions that will help you start to view the world through the lens of data.

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6 Careers That Benefit From UX Skills

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User experience is an interdisciplinary field in its own right, but the concepts, tools, and techniques UX designers use trickle into neighboring professions as well. Understanding the core concepts of user experience can help improve your work in a variety of careers from web development to marketing and design.

Let’s take a look at a range of careers that involve and/or are affected by user experience.

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The 5 Pillars of Your Brand’s Business Model

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A marketing firm in Atlanta, Syrup Marketing, recently wrote a great article about how your brand is the “lead domino,” to quote Tim Ferris. What that means is that, once you create and solidify your brand, everything else tends to fall into place easily. One of those other dominoes that falls into place after you’ve created a fantastic branding strategy is the actual nuts and bolts of your business model.

Any business model is made up of many different moving parts, but they can be boiled down to these five pillars, on which you should build your business.

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5 Hard Things You Have To Do When You Redesign

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Members of the Buster team mapping out their redesign. Photo by Adam Brodowski.

We recently completely redesigned Buster, our online booking site for buses, limos, and vans, after the first version (v1) of our website had been live for about a year. It was our first big review of what had worked in our early product, and what hadn’t, and our biggest chance so far to refresh our thinking about the business we’re growing. Rethinking our product was both cathartic and grueling. Here are the hardest things we had to do to make it happen.

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Top Personality Traits of Every Successful Startup Founder

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Photo: WOC in Tech

A recent University of Phoenix survey showed that 63% of 20-somethings have a strong desire to start a business. That’s a great first step: desire. But what else does it take to start a business that is sustainable? Since 1999, right around the time many of these 20-somethings were born, I’ve started seven businesses. Five of them failed. In that time, I’ve learned from experience what it takes to be a startup founder. 

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Father of “The Lean Startup” Movement Clarifies His Message: Don’t Bulls— Yourself

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Eric Ries discusses his lean startup methodology at General Assembly in New York City.

“Lean Startup is not a religion,” said Eric Ries, the 37 year-old author of The Lean Startup (2011), which is the handbook for what has become a cult-like movement embraced by entrepreneurs and innovators worldwide.

The core philosophy of the book – and of its practitioners – is to test ideas early and often by getting feedback from potential customers. Before investing very much time and money into a product, the idea is to quickly create an MVP (minimal viable product) and put it in front of potential consumers. This avoids wasting time and money developing products that people may not want.

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4 Ways to Prepare for Negotiating Your First Offer As a Developer

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Many of our graduates from the Web Development Immersive program take our course to find work in the tech field as junior developers. As I support them with negotiating their first offers for those roles, there are certain steps that I cover with them, as a Career Coach, to make sure they set themselves up for success. Half of the negotiation process is the prep work you put in prior to negotiation. If you, too, are  interviewing for your first role as a developer, here are 3 steps you can take to position yourself for a well-negotiated offer.

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