Week 267 - Interesting links

Rise of the IndieWeb - Amber Case - FutureTalks (45min video)

Amber Case does a great job of explaining the timeline of events that have led us to the web we currently inhabit; in which we’re happy for our identities to be owned by big corporations and in which it’s so much easier to consume than create. I’m still only viewing the IndieWeb movement from the sidelines but it really resonates with some of my past toy projects and I hope to get more actively involved. — CR

Code Climate

I was interested to read about a team that has tried using code quality metrics to avoid the build-up of technical debt. Dan says that they agreed that every commit should improve the Code Climate scores, but he doesn’t say whether they automatically failed the build in this case. Given that quality metrics are never going to be perfect, I’m intrigued as to whether the changes they found themselves making actually improved the understandability of the code or whether they were just completely focussed on improving the Code Climate scores. — JM

Why are people bored with blogging?

Dave Winer suggests an answer to his question in this post:

It just occurred to me why that is. The blogging tools developers aren’t giving the users anything new and/or interesting to do.

While that might be the case at the moment, I do think there’s some interesting work going on, with Dave’s own Fargo outliner and all the projects being built by the IndieWeb community. Exciting times, I’d say. — CR

GOV.UK social sharing buttons: the first 10 weeks

We’ve been asked to implement “sharing” and “liking” buttons on more web applications than I care to remember. We always question the motivation for adding such functionality and this article demonstrates that people don’t use them much at all (at least in the case of GOV.UK). — JM

Round-up of the third Little Schemer book club meeting

I really enjoyed the most recent Little Schemer book club meeting. We hooked up a laptop to the projector and happily whiled away a couple hours on the GFR sofas collaboratively adding functionality to our interpreter. We’ve nearly got all of the specs (kindly written by Tom Stuart) for chapter one passing. — JM