Monday Links - Week 218

Here are a few links and ideas we’ve been thinking about over the last week. Hopefully this is something we can get going regularly.

Glui

A simple alternative to Skitch, which was bought by Evernote and wandered in the feature wilderness for a while. I’ve used Skitch recently and it’s not too bad, but this could be worth checking out. — JA

The Joy of Clojure, Second Edition

A 2nd edition of the best book on Clojure I’ve read, ‘The Joy of Clojure’, is in the works. You can get 50% off an early access copy using the code ‘joycl2rh’. — TW

Redline Smalltalk

Since reading Kent Beck’s “Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns”, I’ve had a soft spot for Smalltalk, although I’ve never used it in anger. I recently backed this Indiegogo project to get Redline Smalltalk to v1.0. Redline is a Smalltalk for the JVM and the idea is to rejuvenate the Smalltalk community in the same way that Clojure has rejuvenated the Lisp community. — JM

Vagrant Providers

Of course the main news is that you can now use Vagrant with VMWare, but what I’m most interested in is the ability to provision boxes “in the cloud”. If I can run my tests on a serious compute unit that I only pay for when I need it, that could be really useful.

It’s also going to be interesting to follow a company generating some revenue from open-source developer utility. — JA

Santander 2013

I thought this was a great piece of writing, putting into words the unsettling feelings I already had about this advert. — TW

Printer Kit

Some shameless self-promotion, but if you’re in the UK and want to build a GFR Printer, it’s never been easier. — JA

Syme: for real-time collaborating over SSH

Since I live a long way from our office in Shoreditch, I’m always interested in ways to make it easier to do remote pair programming. Syme looks like an interesting open-source project it’s supposed to make it easy to set up disposable EC2 nodes for collaborating on GitHub projects via ssh and tmux. — JM

Design Museum Designs of the Year 2013

On Wednesday 20th the ‘Designs of the Year 2013’ exhibition opens at the design museum. One of the nominees is gov.uk, for which we developed a large part of the Inside Government section. Our friend and occasional office mate Tom Stuart has developed a demo which shows the responsive design, letting you browse simultaneously on three several devices. — TW

Huginn

I’m quite intrigued by Huginn which claims to be a self-hosted mixture of Yahoo! Pipes plus IFTTT where you have a set of “agents” that monitor bits of the internet and act on your behalf based on a set of rules. — JM