Week 416 - Interesting links

Riot

This is an open-source collaboration web app built on top of Matrix, an open network for secure, decentralized communication. It already has bridges to IRC, Slack & Gitter, and includes end-to-end encryption. I really like the idea of us owning more of our own data and this could be a good open-source replacement for Slack. Via Roy Brooks. — JM

MoMA | Talk to Me exhibition

Recently I stumbled across the details of this 2011 exhibition on the Museum of Modern Art’s website. I was interested to see that the Chromaroma project, which we worked on back in the day, appears as an exhibit complete with fancy video! — JM

Semantic Merge

This is an interesting-looking merge tool which is supposedly programming language-aware. The idea is that it will be able to automatically (or at least semi-automatically) merge changes which would result in merge conflicts in a traditional merge tool. For example, if a method definition has been moved on the master branch, but your branch changes the method, this tool should be able to work out what’s happened and do the merge automatically.

Although it doesn’t yet support Ruby, I was interested to read about it because of my work on tracing the git history of a Ruby method. — JM

Mermaid

This handy looking library allows you to use a text-based syntax to generate diagrams and charts. I just installed the Atom editor plugin and it worked really nicely. There are plugins for other editors and integration into static site generators like Jekyll. It’s based on the dagre-d3 library. — JM