Monday Links - Week 251

Recent Bookmarks

This is a neat little Chrome extension that groups your recent (up to 25) bookmarks by day, making it much easier to scan back over things that you’ve bookmarked in order to read later. — CR

Lies, Damned Lies and Estimates

I’m in agreement with much of this article. I think it’s very worthwhile continually assessing what value estimates are giving you versus the cost of generating them. As an agile team gets better at breaking stories down into sensible slices, I’ve seen that story size becomes much more homogenous and counting stories provides just as much value as estimates. I remember reading a TW eBook recently which talked about some of the same issues.

The other important observation in Seb Rose’s article is to note how much emphasis we put on estimating stories when you compare it with how much we put on trying to quantify the business value represented by a story. — JM

Oxford Geek Night #33

I forgot to mention that a couple of weeks back I went to my first OGN. I found the format refreshingly different - it’s hosted on the 1st floor of a pub in Jericho and it was so packed there was standing room only. There was a real mixture of talks - my favourites were one on the Life of Data at the Large Hadron Collider and another about a joke-of-the-day wake-up call service.

Both were full of amusing anecdotes - one about how the LHC people used vast quantities of liquid nitrogen to freeze a river so they could dig down through it - and another about how the dial tone (etc) for the University of Oxford’s internal phone system is completely non-standard. — JM

Why the Obamacare website was doomed

The Cabinet Office now has some geeks who can spot consultancy bullshit at 50 paces

‘nuff said. — JM

Cargo Cult CSS

I’ve never been sold on the oocss approach and this post contains some compelling arguments against it. It also contains an alternative approach using a preprocessor and mixins to give us the best of both worlds (semantic markup and reusable CSS components). — CR