Week 448 - Interesting links

It’s just lunch

Jeffrey Zeldman’s experiences on having lunch with former clients. At Go Free Range we have a principle of always meeting anyone who contacts us with a potential project. And we’ll always tell them if we think working with us is not the best way to develop their idea. We get a lot out of these conversations and are happiest when we’re able to help - whether that involves a paid engagement or not. — CL

ABCUL perseveres with Model Credit Union project

I was depressed to read this update on the “progress” of the government-backed Credit Union Expansion Project:

The project started in 2014. The first go-lives were originally scheduled for 2015 but got pushed back by nearly a year.

And even a couple of months ago, only three credit unions were using the new platform. I’m really not convinced that the approach taken by ABCUL/Cornerstone has given the government (and therefore us) very good value for money and the lack of transparency has been woeful. — JM

PharoLambda Serverless Debugging

I enjoyed this video of Tim Mackinnon demonstrating how to run an Alexa Skill on AWS Lambda using Pharo Smalltalk via PharoLambda. The most interesting bit was when he serialized the remote Smalltalk environment (on AWS Lambda) into a file in an S3 bucket and then de-serialized it locally in order to use the debugger in his development environment to track down and fix the problem. Very neat! — JM

graphcool/chromeless

Continuing the AWS Lambda theme, this project which allows you to programmatically control a headless Chrome browser on AWS Lambda via a WebSocket looks interesting. You can see a nice demo of it in use in Netlify’s Chromeless Playground. — JM

The probability my son will be stung by a bumblebee

A fun article from Rasmus Bååth where he uses probabilistic reasoning, experimental data and a model built with Stan to predict the probability that his son will step on a bee while playing barefoot in the garden. The fun academics get up to when they are on holiday! — CL