Unboxed Roundup: our links for w/c 24th November 2014

Autosquashing in git rebase - Alex

http://hamberg.no/erlend/posts/2013-11-29-git-autosquash.html

A nifty efficiency boost for squashing your branches

Actually using the database - Murray

https://bendyworks.com/actually-using-the-database/

This article explores (in the context of writing a Haskell application) actually letting our databases do what they're good at and making use of their features to provide some of the things that our frameworks deal with in code. Rails suggests keeping all the business logic of our application in the rails code and simply treating the database as a dumb store. A large part of this approach is about being agnostic to the underlying db so it's interesting to look at alternative approaches and think about what we miss-out on by using a one-size fits all framework.

Start afresh every day - Murray

http://articles.coreyhaines.com/posts/short-lived-branches/

A few times in the past I've discussed "delete everything that's not done every day" as a slightly whimsical or masochistic development methodology with friends; admittedly this usually happens in the pub where ideas don't often require a grounding in reality or pragmatism. Corey Haines' article above isn't quite as hard-line as our pub-chat, but I was surprised to see someone talking about the same idea, even if it is slightly watered-down. It can be useful to challenge our assumptions about how we work every so often just to see what we can come up with. If re-writing at the feature or story level every day could be useful, I do wonder if re-writing the entire app every TIME_PERIOD_X would also be useful. Maybe "the big rewrite" isn't something to be scared of?

The Gmail / Inbox split - Dom

http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/16/why-did-google-decide-to-split-inbox-from-gmail/

Summary of the GMail/Inbox split decision. The core purpose being: Most Gmail users only get a trickle of emails. Inbox is aimed at super users handling 'a firehose of emails every day'.