Week 295 - Interesting links

Seeing Is Believing

This Ruby gem allows you to display the results of every line of code within various text editors. Neat. Via Tom S. — JM

A Little Printer Mystery

I was sad to hear about the demise of BERG and the uncertain future of Little Printer earlier this week, but I was somewhat cheered by James A’s tale of mysterious conversations appearing in the output of Little Printers around the world.

Git Pretty

This is a handy flowchart for working out what to do if you get yourself into a mess with git. Not something that ever happens to me! — JM

All our Coderwall are belong to you

In what looks like a significant pivot, the people who built Coderwall have open-sourced the codebase and plan to share the revenue with the community who they hope will continue to develop it.

It looks like they’re using Coderwall as an exemplar for their new crowd-founding website, Assembly. I’ve not really used Coderwall myself, but I am interested in this open-source revenue-sharing model.

Also this quote is a great advertisement for how open-sourcing your code tends to make you want to improve its quality:

Sharing a still-running product’s source code is mildly unsettling. Unlike our other open source code which we write for public consumption, this wasn’t originally intended to be so. It has its share of technical debt […]

We have experience of this having helped develop Inside Government in the open. — JM

Network Rail opens up about the causes of delays

I applaud this attempt by Network Rail to better explain the reasons for delayed trains. More transparency, please! — JM

COBOL on COGS

The next big thing? — JM

Let’s Talk About 3 Months of Self-Quantifying

I found some of these conclusions interesting. I collect a reasonable amount of data about myself but am yet to use it to try to draw any conclusions. — CR

Check Business - Go Free Range Ltd

We received an email from this company saying that we could claim our page in someway.

I was quite surprised to see the amount of information they were displaying about us. I can only imagine they buy the information (e.g. annual accounts) from Companies House and then republish that data. — CR

Chrome Apps & Extensions Developer Tool - Chrome Web Store

This looks interesting - I’ll have to give it a go if/when we do more work on the FreeAgent Transaction Explainer. — CR