Unboxed Roundup: our links for w/c 11th May 2015

Predicting future using past data and SQL - Tadas T

https://www.periscope.io/blog/extrapolating-data-with-day-of-week-effects.html

People from persicope.io take you through a solution to a problem they had: predicting weekly server load growth, step by step, with clear explanations. I highly recommend subscribing to their blog updates as the articles are consistently good.

Where are your requests coming from? - Tom S

https://github.com/biola/Voight-Kampff

A handy gem that can be used to check whether a request has been made by a bot (e.g. in your controller: request.bot?). Great for filtering out real users for analytics or avoiding unwanted API calls when a bot visits the site.

Is testing a design tool? - Pedro M

http://codurance.com/2015/05/12/does-tdd-lead-to-good-design/

I like the notion put forth by this article of not being tied to a specific style and learning from different approaches. I tend to make a conscious effort of not being to set in a way of thinking about design/testing and this is a welcome discussion.

IoT = Internet of Thieving Robots? - Dom M

http://www.wired.com/2015/05/little-3-d-printed-robot-cracks-combination-locks-30-seconds/

This 3D printed, Arduino-powered robot cracks a cylinder lock like a crab cracks a winkle. As the IoT and robotics accelerates ahead of legislation and regulation, what nefarious future is possible for drones, bots and self replicating devices?

Why to kill your yearly performance reviews? - Carmen B

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140206114808-15893932-how-adobe-got-rid-of-traditional-performance-reviews

It's great to see a corporate starting to do something about year performance reviews, considering all the data and research indicating how damaging they are to team work and overall company performance: “nourishes short-term performance, annihilates long-term planning, builds fear, demolishes teamwork, nourishes rivalry and politics.”

Having a coaching and advice model seems not only more efficient, but more 'human'.

Is a Twitter message too big? - Dom M

http://mumbrella.com.au/new-york-times-apple-watch-attracting-more-mobile-readers-and-driving-newsroom-changes-293687

Apple Watch forces content creators to rethink services.

Rails Polymorphic Associations - Neil vB

http://6ftdan.com/allyourdev/2015/02/10/rails-polymorphic-models/

A polymorphic association allows us to specify a belongs_to relationship on one model without specifying the model type it belongs to. This makes it easy to have a model that belongs to multiple other model types. The example used in this article is a Comment model which can belong to an Article, Photo or Event. The post includes lots of code snippets and command line generator commands and it explains clearly what problems would arise if polymorphic associations weren’t possible.

Track of the Week - Sarah B

This time next Friday Chris and I will be on the way to Japan, probably somewhere over Siberia. So it would only be right to have a Japanese themed song to get in the mood: