Week 334 - Interesting links

Google Photos

I’ve recently moved all my data, including my photos, from Dropbox to Google Drive. I was part way through the migration when Google Photos was released and was pleasantly surprised when the Assistant started presenting me with highlights it found in my old photos. I really like being able to store my photos on my computer in my chosen directory structure, have them synced to Google Drive and then have Google Photos sit on top of them as an alternative interface. — CR

Exposed: Magicians, Psychics and Frauds

I really enjoyed this documentary about James ‘The Amazing’ Randi. As a magician, James started noticing the tricks he knew being used to take advantage of vulnerable people. Frustrated with the situation, he seems to have made it his life work to fight these fraudsters. A very entertaining, and at times emotional, film. — CR

Google Analytics Debugger

This Chrome extension came in really handy when I was trying to understand whether I’d configured Google Analytics correctly while doing some work on Smart Answers. — CR

Doing the hard work to make it clear

Although I don’t tend to do many presentations, this article and the previous one, Doing the hard work to make it big, by Russell Davies made me think a bit about whether we could’ve done a better job with the slides we made for our talk about Pair Programming. — JM

Surviving Self-Deluded Leaders

I enjoyed reading this article which discusses the “thin line between self-belief and over-confidence”. — JM

Trailblazer

Trailblazer is a thin layer on top of Rails. It gently enforces encapsulation, an intuitive code structure and gives you an object-oriented architecture.

I haven’t had a chance to dive into this in detail, but I certainly have a lot of sympathy with the motivations behind it. I’d love to hear from anyone who’s been using it in anger. Via David H. — JM

PivotalTracker: Cycle Time Report

This article demonstrates a Ruby script which uses the Pivotal Tracker API to calculate Kanban-esque cycle time for accepted stories. I was interested in it, because I attempted something similar in my Pivotal Watcher project a while ago and I recognised some of the limitations of the API to which Lisa alludes. It’s certainly encouraging to hear that Pivotal are “planning new reports that will show these types of metrics”. — JM

The Truth About Toilet Swirl

This pair of videos about which way water goes down the plug-hole in different hemispheres is very well put together and made me laugh. — JM