Week 440 - Interesting links

Crisp: Happiness Index

Crisp are a self-organising consulting company based in Stockholm, Sweden. They use a “happiness index” as their primary metric that they use to make decisions about the direction of the company. This is very similar to an idea we’ve kicked around at Go Free Range from time to time. I was interested to see that they’ve split out separate scores for client and non-client work. — JM

Pinboard acquires Delicious

This isn’t exactly hot off the press, but since it came as quite a surprise to me, I thought I’d mention it. As a heavy user of the original del.icio.us website, I was very sad to see what became of it after it was sold by Yahoo. Anyway, kudos to Maciej Cegłowski for his relentless focus on providing the best bookmarking service (other than Roosmarks, obviously!). — JM

Examples of governing documents / handbooks / constitutions

We’ve been considering revising our company’s governing documents and potentially sharing publicly some of the wiki we use internally so that other tech co-operatives can learn from how we work. I started this thread over on the CoTech community discussion forum to collect examples from other organisations. — CL

99 Bottles of OOP

I’ve been working through Sandi Metz and Katrina Owen’s book “99 Bottles of OOP” in the last week. It’s a very well-written exploration of practical test-driven development and refactoring. Metz and Owen refer throughout to design and refactoring patterns and how they can be used to address “code smells”. This in particular made me think about our recent work refactoring an application for a client and how having a common language for describing a refactoring helps to keep individual chunks of work (for example in pull requests) self-contained. — CL