Monday Links - Week 252

Why Are Computers

Tom Stuart’s new podcast. I feel slightly guilty that I haven’t listened to episode 1 yet but knowing Tom, I don’t doubt that it’ll be great. — CR

How to Subscribe to A Brand’s Facebook Page in an RSS Feed Reader

I found myself wanting to do this last week when a bike shop said they’d announce a bike sale on their facebook page. Following these instructions seem to have done the trick - now I just need to read my feeds… — CR

Developer Preview - AWS SDK for JavaScript in the Browser

Being able to access AWS using Javascript is definitely something I’ve wished I could do in the past (although I can’t remember why at the moment). I came across this on Dave Winer’s post where he also points out a similar change that Dropbox announced a year ago. — CR

Slack: Be less busy

I’ve seen James Weiner waxing lyrical about this service and based on the limited information on the the home page it does sound useful. It also reminds me of Project Codename: PissWhistle mentioned in James A’s article about working remotely a while back. — JM

Why having no goals in our lives might make us happier and more successful

This article chimes a little with my own thoughts about setting goals for yourself or your company and relates to discussions we’ve had within GFR over the last couple of years. The article suggests that it’s better to commit to a process or a system rather than committing to a long-term goal. The author reckons that goals can be useful in setting a direction, but can also be unhelpful in actually making progress towards that goal. I don’t think this article is the be-all-and-end-all regarding goal-setting, but I think it does contain some useful insights. — JM

Why Code Climate is Good for Society

My former Reevoo colleague, Tom Lea, explains why having a machine review your code might be better than having a person review your code. — JM

Unconditional Programming

I (unfairly) associate code written in a functional style with impenetrably complex algorithms, so it’s interesting to see an example where a functional style can make the code more declarative:

If we are working in an object-oriented language, we can replace switch-statements with polymorphism. The same trick works well for if-statements too, but it can be overkill in simple cases. When we use languages with functional features, we can do most of the work that we do in loops using maps, filters, and folds. Control structures end up disappearing, and that can be a good thing.

Michael works through a simple example using Ruby. — JM