Unboxed Roundup: our links for w/c 23rd February 2015

CSS statistics for your website - Tom S

http://www.stylestats.org/

This little utility will parse a website and break it down to some CSS statistics, resulting in items such as the most popular properties, unique colours, and many others.

Programming Myths - Murray

http://videlalvaro.github.io/2015/02/programming-myths.html

This article / talk-transcript from Alvaro Videla is a deep-dive on the history of a particular statement that programmers just "know" is correct: "don't use goto's". The problem is, most of us can't really explain why we shouldn't use gotos and so the statement becomes a myth. Alvaro goes back to the source to explain where the statement came from, the history and context surrounding it, and why we shouldn't let ourselves get caught up in myths.

The historical context Alvaro provides reminded me of The Future of Programming by Brett Victor which is also excellent and well worth your time.

Staring into the nil abyss - Pedro

• http://www.sandimetz.com/blog/2014/12/19/suspicions-of-nil /
• https://robots.thoughtbot.com/if-you-gaze-into-nil-nil-gazes-also-into-you

I found myself in a curious situation dealing with a legacy codebase this week. Dealing with nil is something we do everyday as Ruby developers and these two blog posts work well together when considering approaches to handling it.

Refactoring external services to patterns - Patrick V

http://martinfowler.com/articles/refactoring-external-service.html

Martin Fowler walks through an example of a single script doing a bunch of things into a more modular design. The example isn't complex, but it is nicely indicative of the process. The discussion of other design patterns and trade-offs of how the code could also have been refactored in order to make things more single responsibility is great - highlighting that there is never one answer.

What colour is this dress? - Chris C

http://www.wired.com/2015/02/science-one-agrees-color-dress/

An explanation as to why a dress seems to have divided the world of Twitter overnight.

Technology Radar - Claire

http://techradar.io

A while ago the CEO at Unboxed Consulting sent out a doodle poll related to what technology options our employees thought were interesting and that we may consider if we were to diversify our offering. Knowing that our clients do not necessarily understand the technology used but just know that we build digital products really well, this seems like an interesting topic for discussion. This morning I met Andy Waite who shared this link to a project that he is working on that is an adaptation of the Thoughtworks Technology Radar but for companies (like us) to use.

Track of the Week - Dom

Big Rock Candy Mountain by Harry McClintock - I love the railway rider/hobo’s utopian vision served up in this song: “…there’s a lake of whiskey and one of stew…” McClintock adds a slur to it for authenticity! My Grandad and Dad used to play it on the harmonic and banjo at family events.”