Week 332 - Interesting links

Mondo

Last year when we were working on our Credit Union project, we met up with Tom Blomfield to chat about what he was doing at Bank Possible (which is now called Starling). It turns out that he’s now left Starling and has started his own mobile-first bank, Mondo.

I also recently came across Monese which seems to be offering something similar. It certainly seems as if there’s loads of activity in this sector. I can’t wait for some better offerings to appear - they’re long overdue. — JM

Microservice Premium

In this article Martin Fowler says:

My primary guideline would be don’t even consider microservices unless you have a system that’s too complex to manage as a monolith. The majority of software systems should be built as a single monolithic application. Do pay attention to good modularity within that monolith, but don’t try to separate it into separate services.

Apparently microservices are the new hotness. So-called “monolithic” applications are not. It’s unfortunate that the word “monolithic” is used so pejoratively. The development and operational costs of building an application as a set of microservices are often massively under-estimated. — JM

Inbox SDK

This is supposedly a high-level JavaScript library with which you can build browser extensions to interact with your Gmail account. It seems to have been extracted from Streak CRM and as far as I can see it’s free to use, although not open-source. Chris & I often talk about automating the handling of company-related emails and I thought this might be worth a try. — JM

Dynamic Site as fast as a Static Generated One with Raptor

A while ago Chris talked about moving his blog from Webby to a standard Rails app. He thought that by taking full advantage of HTTP caching he’d be able to achieve similar performance to that of a static website. This article reminded me of that conversation. — JM

githop

This is like Timehop, but for GitHub. It reminded me of an idea Chris had recently - showing you your own commit messages some time after you made them to see whether you can still understand what you meant. — JM

Open Location Code: Addresses for everything, everywhere

Google have developed a Postcode-like system for the entire world! Seeing this reminded me of Tom’s little geohash exploring utility that he wrote about back in September 2011! It turns out that there are a number of alternative location encoding systems, including Geohash, and the open-location-code repository contains an interesting comparison that helps explain the motivation for yet another system. — CR

Time-lapse Mining from Internet Photos

This is great! A completely automated approach for generating time-lapse movies from large numbers of public images available on the web. — CR

Introducing new open, shareable steps in FutureLearn courses

It’s great to see FutureLearn start to open up some of their course content to people that aren’t registered on the course. I know they’ve been wanting to do it for quite some time so it’s great to see them making progress in this direction. — CR