Emilie Kormienko

According to learning theory, a grade is just a reward (or punishment!) signal. However, one of its obvious shortcomings is that it is totally lacking in precision. The grade of an exam is usually just a simple sum—and as such, it summarizes different sources of errors without distinguishing them. It is therefore insufficiently informative: by... See more

A blockchain is maintained by a distributed network of parties (“miners” or “validators,” depending on the kind of chain). These parties produce blocks jointly via consensus. In simple terms, the parties vote on how to process a set of transactions—or in other words, how to construct the next block. The block with majority support is the one that... See more

The 7 Ps of community design: people, purpose, place, participation, policy, promotion, performance.

 The only true end of onboarding is when a user is habitually using your product.

I’d describe my time from 2015-2020 (when the book will be published) in three distinct phases: Phase I: 2015-2016: Discovery, exploration, initial research, hypothesis generation (funded by the Ford Foundation); Phase II: 2016-2018: Experience, experimenting, hypothesis testing (working at GitHub); Phase III: 2018-2020: Refining, summarizing,... See more

But Homo sapiens’ dependency on social communication and education is as much of a curse as it is a gift. On the flip side of the coin, it is education’s fault that religious myths and fake news propagate so easily in human societies. From the earliest age, our brains trustfully absorb the tales we are told, whether they are true or false. In a... See more

Mobile was a platform shift — a paradigm shift in how the Internet worked. It increased scale and consumer sophistication, making applications 10x easier to use. Unlike desktop computers, phones were… personal. You could take them anywhere, access them without friction, and do just about anything: make a call, take a photo, find a location, submit... See more