Startups for the unexotic underclass

If you're an entrepreneur looking for ideas, consider looking beyond the city-centric, navel-gazing, youth-obsessed mainstream.

The unexotic underclass in a fascinating read for startups looking for meaningful ideas for new apps.

It's a call to action for us to stop wasting our time developing the next fashion-hunting twitter-app for our manicured dogs...
and instead start looking at solving some real problems that affect real people that we tend to mostly overlook, because they're just not treated as *interesting* enough by our society.

Really worth a read

Vale David E.

There's too much death going around right now.

The ruby world has been rocked by the death of of Jim Weirich (kind man, great teacher and original writer of rake)...

But for me, I have to say this is overshadowed by two deaths much closer to home.

About 3 weeks ago, my grandfather died.

I was never really close to him, but his passing sent ripples through my family. Even my close family came back from the states to attend the funeral and be with my grandmother.

But my grandfather had made it to 96. He was well-travelled and had managed to complete his book on lay evangelism - which was the end result of his life's work in his church. He lived a long, full life.

This morning, my uncle gave up his struggle with cancer.

He was only 70, and the world is that much less bright without him in it.

He was kind and generous, and always made me laugh. He brought joy and love back to my aunt - whom he married only a few short months ago (right after the diagnosis).

He was way too young to die.

Link: Stack Overflow Goes Down, Programmers Around The World Panic

StackOverflow went down on Sunday. It's back up now, but it sure serves as a reminder of how much we've come to rely on this truly awesome resource.

The article above shows some of the (inevitable) humour that flowed from the event... but it does leave me with that feeling that we're whistling nervously in the dark - what if it went away for reals?

Link: a deeper look at ruby's enumerable

Have you ever needed to load a VERY large file in ruby? No I don't mean your 500 line rails model. I mean a several gig binary or text file.

Try it. Watch your machine become unresponsive. Cry a little inside. Then reach for enumerable.

Ruby's Enumerable module gives you a way of iterating over collections in a lazy manner, loading only what you need, when you need it. But it gives us so much more than that.

rubylove has written a great, in-depth look into enumerable with: A Deeper Look at Ruby's Enumerable

Gamification on coursera

Kevin Werbach's coursera course on gamification is restarting again!

He's the bloke who wrote For the Win: How Game Thinking Can Revolutionize Your Business - and the gamification course had amazing reviews.

I started it too late last time to fully participate - and now I get another chance!

it's only just begun - so there's still time to sign up without missing out on any of the assignments or the option to get a certification.