Working effectively in different organisational cultures - Martyn E

http://www.methodsandtools.com/archive/agileculture.php

Really interesting article with regards to the culture at Unboxed as well as the challenges we face helping other organisations. It analyses the Schneider model of organisational culture and maps Agile, Kanban and Software Craftsmanship onto its axis.

Looking skyward: The Big Picture - Tom S

http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/bigpicture/2015/07/14/looking-skyward/7DekRzEUd5TEiTHvkEmW1J/story.html

A fascinating collection of photos. #6, #17 and #43 are my favourite three, but all are worth gazing at.

Our terrible tooling - Murray S

http://devblog.avdi.org/2015/07/08/ruby-is-defined-by-terrible-tools/

Avdi Grimm talks about the elephant in the room when it comes to ruby: our tooling ecosystem is terrible. Things that were easy when I was a java programmer and using an IDE are fraught with danger as a rubyist. For example: renaming a model in a rails app is painful; there's so many things to consider (model file, model name, association names in other models, call-sites for class methods in the rest of the app, spec files, spec names, factories, db migrations, etc..). My solution is to use a hasty script knocked together by Paul Battley. It should be the kind of tooling that rails ships with. It should be baked into our editors (it is available in rubymine but as a community we seem to prefer text editors to IDEs).

Pluto - Tom S

Pluto

xkcd has been performing some scientific analysis on the distant planet

No Man’s Sky - Tom S

PBS Game/Show discusses the biggest game in history. With over 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 worlds to explore, I wondered how it was not only made, but also tested. Interesting to see that they have bots that send gameplay videos back to the team - making sure that the algorithms they write are producing beautiful worlds.