Week 316 - Interesting links

Snowdrift.coop

This non-profit member-owned cooperative describes itself as “a matching patronage system funding freely-licensed works”. I’m intrigued by this attempt to combine the benefits of the Proprietary and the Open Source models. — JM

Google Cloud Platform

I’d always ignored Google’s Cloud Computing offering, because I thought their App Engine was limited to using only Python, Java or (more recently) Go.

However, I recently read a couple of articles saying that Google’s pricing compared favourably with that of AWS and that they have a simpler discount mechanism than EC2 Reserved Instances.

Anyway, this encouraged me to read a bit more about their Compute Engine and discovered that they support a couple of easy-to-deploy Ruby “stacks”. Anyway, it seems clear that I should be considering Google as an alternative to AWS. — JM

Goldman prepares to muscle in on the lending innovation designed to sideline banks

It’s a bit depressing that “big” banks are moving into the P2P lending space. — JM

LibreBoard

I came across this open-source alternative to Trello while perusing the apps being made available on the Sandstorm platform. — JM

Minimum Viable Blockchain

I found this to be a very clear explanation of the properties and benefits of the block chain mechamism underlying crypto-currencies. — JM

Pairing with Junior Developers

Sarah Mei’s top 5 recommendations for mid-level or senior developers pairing with junior developers. Very insightful. — JM

Erowid Recruiter

A Markov-powered mashup of Erowid trip reports and tech recruiter emails. It comes up with some amazing tweets! — JM

ScrapingHub

A platform for deploying and running web crawlers. The Crawlera service looks particularly interesting from the point of view of avoiding being banned when doing regular scraping of a site. — JM