Cool Links
The World Wide Web is big and scary, and sometimes you need the recommendations of others to guide your way to webpages worth watching. Here, therefore, are some cool links to cool things that you might want to, cool-ly, inspect.
Sandi Metz - Nothing is Something (keynote speech at RailsConf 2015) Should be interesting and educational for all the programmers out there. Sandi talks about how to tackle object oriented programming problems, and the Null Object pattern, the idea of the Active Nothing. It’s Ruby-focused, but practical Object-Oriented Design lessons are applicable across most languages. Her speech from the previous year is more about ‘life’ than programming, but it is very, very worth a watch.
Woodland Secrets Ep. 54: Katherine Cross – This was a great episode, with Merritt Kopas and her guest, Katherine Cross, holding a long, in-depth conversation on the subjects of sociology, work, gamification, and online discourse. Katherine’s writing on society, culture and games is well worth exploring. Go and check it out.
Here’s a talk about universal basic income. Worth a listen.
You may have heard of 99% Invisible, the excellent design podcast. Episode 212: Turf Wars of East New York, contains some excellent historical insight into the widespread issue facing American cities (and other cities around the world) of gentrification, 20th-century shifts in inner city residential demographics, and how inextricably knotted up it all is with US racist and ethnic tension.
Landlords and real estate investors saw opportunity in the desperation of immigrant populations. They would come to hone two profit-driven tactics that would subsequently shape neighborhoods around the country: fear-induced white flight and predatory lending.