Monday Links - Week 220

Open your mind, and let us pour in a generous ladel of delicious Interesting Broth!

Hashtags considered harmful

“I believe hashtags are aesthetically damaging. I believe a tweet free of hashtags is more pleasing to the eye, more easily consumed, and thus more likely to be retweeted (which is a proven way of growing your audience). I believe for every person who stumbles upon your tweet via hashtag, you’re likely turning off many more who are put off by hashtag overuse. We need not banish the hashtag, but let’s start putting more thought into when we’re using it.”

Perhaps this lends weight to the motivation behind HeyList!… — JA

Helper Testing in Rails 3

I hadn’t realised that you could call render and subsequently use assert_select in ActionView::TestCase tests. In the past, we’ve used a custom assert_select_in_html to do this. — CR

Minimum Viable Book

A couple of our friends, Amy and Emily, have started writing a book about agile practices. What’s interesting isn’t the topic (though they have a wealth of experience so I’m sure will have plenty to say) but the fact they’re writing it in an open and agile way. We can learn not just from the book, but from the process of writing it. — TW

GOV.UK is going Worldwide

GDS have launched the worldwide section of Inside Government that we, at GFR were involved with earlier this year. It’s always good to be reminded about the scale of the project we’ve been involved in, as well as see our work go live. Also, congratulations to the team on reaching 18 of 24 departments. We know they’ve been working really hard. — CR

The UK Backlogs Agency?

Full Fact investigate the claims that it’ll take 24 years to clear UKBA’s backlog. — CR

The Management-Free Organisation

You’ve probably already seen this via John Gruber; it’s obvious within GFR that if we didn’t have good people, there’s no way we could operate without someone cracking the whip.

However, I’m curious about point 3 in Scott Adams’s decision process (“The smartest choice becomes obvious to all”). In my experience, this isn’t as trivial as Scott makes it sound. The smartest choice often isn’t obvious, and it’s quite easy for subjective influences and personal interests to weigh heavily in any decision-making process. — JA

Learn Prime from Thoughtbot

$99 a month initially sounded really high but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s comparable to what larger companies might pay for employee training. — CR

Copy as curl

It’s been available in the canary builds for a while, but now the developer builds of Chrome have an incredibly useful feature, copying requests as a curl command. This makes it super easy to reproduce any request made by the browser, including all the headers, cookies and more. — TW

How the Maker of TurboTax Fought Free, Simple Tax Filing

There are obviously two sides to this story and I have no idea whether it’d be better or worse for the public if the IRS prepared their tax returns for them; but… my gut feel is that Intuit are lobbying to protect their own interests, rather than those of the public. — CR

JS1k Spring 2013

The entries for this year’s JS1k competition are really outstanding. This from @romancortes and this one from @ehouais caught my eye, but it’s worth watching as many as you can. It’s amazing what people can do with less code than characters in this blog post. — TW