Monday Links - Week 219

Here are a few links and ideas we’ve been thinking about over the last week.

How do you fight the UKBA when they’re wrong?

This is a personal one: My friend’s being asked to leave the UK due to what appears to be an error on UKBA’s side. If anyone can help in any way, please do get in touch. — CR

A FizzBuzz fit for the enterprise

As developers, we’ve all had to write implementations of FizzBuzz at one time or another. These versions might be good enough to get a job, but where can one find a version that’s fit for the enterprise market? Lucikly Mikael Kragbæk has the answer to the question nobody asked. — TW

Today’s Email Incident

Github explain, in detail, an unexpected side effect of keeping up with the most recent Rails patches. As a slight aside, I tried this code on an empty 3.2.13 app, using sqlite3 and I don’t see the problem they’re experiencing. — CR

Building a GOV.UK exhibit

James M mentioned our sneak peek of this in the Week 217 notes. Tom Stuart has an excellent write-up about how he sychronised browsing across a suite of devices to demonstrate the responsive nature of the GOV.UK design. It’s being shown at the Design Museum as part of the 2013 Designs of the Year awards. — JA

Kernel#backtrace

Here’s a quick tip to get a backtrace in ruby. So simple, it’s almost worth the cost of reopening Kernel. — TW

The Myth of Focus & Why Many Great Entrepreneurs Pursued Multiple Projects at Once

I’m still trying to work out the level of focus that this guy’s talking about, but I’m sure there’s something in this. — CR

Don’t be a free user

Given the announcement about Google Reader shutting down, this post from December 2011 is surprisingly relevant. We run quite a lot of our business on free web-based software from Google, but even if we paid Google I’m not convinced that they wouldn’t consider shutting Google Apps For Your Domain. It all comes down to whether or not the interests of the customer align with those of the service provider, and most of us are only useful to Google when we are providing them with data or clicking on ads. Hmm. — JA

Infographic as menu

This menu can be found in an old furniture shop in Stoke Newington that’s now being used as a café, to build furniture, and for displaying local artists. I spotted the menu on Saturday, but credit goes to my friend Steve Guy for having the presence of mind to take a picture. — TW

Self-Organizing Organizations (For Real)

This is probably the first example I’ve come across of another company operating similarly to GFR. It’s interesting to read about the challenges they’ve faced and compare them to our own experiences. — CR

Autonomous Teams: What They Are and Why You Should Care

“Autonomous teams have the greater potential for success than either of the two alone. You have the freedom to do your best work while working as a cohesive unit to produce reliable and quality output.” — CR

The Silver Searcher

Ostensibly a replacement for ack, it claims to be 3-5x faster again, and respects any ignore settings in your project (like .gitignore). I use Sublime Text 2 these days, and I’m not sure what it uses for searching underneath the hood (this post suggests it’s an ack variant); ultimately integration with your workflow is going to be determine whether or not this is useful, but even so it could be handy just in the Terminal. — JA

The brutal truth about marketing your software product

As much as it currently pains me, I believe this is something that GFR are going to need to get better at to be successful in the product business. — CR