Week 367 - Interesting links

One year in one image

This reminds me of the daily time slice images I created from the photos I was taking of the Thames. I’m impressed by the fact that this covers an entire year and it makes me want to try to create something similar with the images I’ve captured. — CR

Nick on Twitter

I don’t have any analytics on this blog. I don’t know how many visitors it gets, how many RSS subscribers it has, or which posts are more popular than other posts. I like not knowing.

This is the reason I don’t have any analytics, or record any logs, of visitors to my blog. I think it’s all too easy for the thing being measured to become the primary focus and to take away from the original reason for doing something. While this post might specifically be about the author writing on their blog I think the general principle applies in many cases. — CR

Anonymising job applications for technical roles at FutureLearn

I enjoyed reading this post about FutureLearn’s experiment to anonymise details of applicants for their Ruby developer roles. It sounds as though there was some initial doubt but that the trial has paid off. Good work, FutureLearn!

After trialling anonymisation with six Ruby developer candidates, we could see that it was good for our preparation; it was much easier for the team to pay attention to relevant information, and it was particularly useful guidance for team members who’d not done hiring before.

I particularly liked this quote too:

We don’t care about having worked at big-name tech companies – we care about job responsibilities. We don’t care about having given talks at prestigious conferences – we care about being able to communicate with us.

— CR

1Password 6 for Mac is here!

Both James and I use 1Password personally and have a shared vault set-up for GFR credentials. Having login details for the same site stored in multiple vaults could occasionally cause problems so I was particularly pleased to see the addition of the All Vaults view. — CR

Rail Travel - Station Usage 1997-2015

This is a really nice visualisation of passenger numbers at each of the railway stations in the UK over time. — JM

BFI Player

The British Film Institute presents the best global cinema on-demand: From classic and contemporary films to the best of the BFI National Archive.

I came across this via Joel Chippindale’s Find a film website. I haven’t used the BFI Player yet, but it looks as if it has a good selection of films. — JM

Why Are So Many Zappos Employees Leaving?

I was interested to read this article which speculates whether Tony Hsieh’s experiment in holocracy is in trouble. From what I can tell, it’s far too soon to draw any conclusions, but in the early days of GFR, I think we all occasionally experienced the disorientating nature of a non-hierarchical workplace.

Although it’s a relatively simple idea, Harmonia has definitely been an effective way for us to deal with a lot of this uncertainty. Perhaps Zappos should sign up! — JM

Opening GOV.UK’s Puppet repository

Kudos to GDS for making their Puppet repository public. I particularly like the fact that they took the trouble to preserve as much of the commit history as they could while avoiding exposing security credentials currently in use. — JM

How do bank payments actually work?

I found this article by Tom Blomfield on the Mondo blog really interesting. It’s exactly the kind of thing we were trying to find out about when we worked on our Credit Union project e.g. we wrote this payment mechanisms wiki page.

In my opinion, this type of information should be much more readily available from the relevant institutions. — JM

One of those days 2 - Candide Thovex - Youtube

An amazing bit of skiing! — JM