Week 266 - Interesting links

Adventures in Raspberry Pi

Even if your kids don’t have an ounce of computer geek in them, they can learn to code with Raspberry Pi and this wonderful book. Written for 11- to 15-year-olds and assuming no prior computing knowledge, this book uses the wildly successful, low-cost, credit-card-sized Raspberry Pi computer to explain fundamental computing concepts.

I’ve not read this book by Carrie Anne Philbin, but it sounds good! — JM

How the Guardian successfully moved domain to www.theguardian.com

Working on a project with so many stakeholders and with such wide-reaching changes could have led to a form of paralysis that stopped the project from getting off the ground. However, by making our releases live immediately and accessible internally, the development team had inverted the traditional flow of pressure. We could continually petition the stakeholders by asking, “Can we make it live now?” rather than the more traditional model of stakeholders asking the development team, “Is it ready yet?”. This was a very healthy state to be in for everyone concerned.

I like their idea of making the new URLs live but only allowing access to them if a special HTTP header is set. This changed what would’ve been a very big bang release into a much more incremental affair. — JM

A Language for Embedded Developers

While doing some research into Ruby parsers, I recently came across Peter Zotov’s website. He’s the author of the parser gem which I’m using at the moment. The article I’ve linked to explains his idea for a “dialect” of Ruby well-suited for programing embedded systems. I was particularly intrigued that the language itself will be written in Ruby using “a set of built-in functions and some amount of syntactic expansion”. Unfortunately it’s not open-source. — JM

Extreme Programmers London Meetup

I was interested to read about this new London group which aims to offer a narrower focus on technical dicussions for developers practicing XP. — JM

Rendered Prose Diffs on GitHub

This is a great addition to the standard diff output: GitHub now allows you to view a diff of both the document source (e.g. markdown) and rendered output (e.g HTML). — CR

Top Tip – View Source In Android

I’m sure I’ve wanted to be able to do this in the past; and now I know how! A top tip indeed from The Lab at O2. — CR