Once again I find myself writing these notes on a train. This time it’s to Exeter along with James Weiner to meet with a potential new client. I don’t know all that much about the projects he’s got in mind, but the connection was a word-of-mouth recommendation, which is always gratifying.

So far, it’s been a week spent primarily on work for a single client–very much a rarity lately–and it’s been good to be able to focus. I even ended my period of avoiding looking at facebook by working with some of their APIs and once I deciphered the documentation it wasn’t too bad. It’s not so much that the documentation is bad, but like the platform in general it makes huge all-or-nothing assumptions and all I wanted was something equivalent to oAuth.

Meanwhile things are gathering pace for the next couple of months’ projects. There’s a big one that Matt’s heading up that will occupy the majority of March and is quite exciting, and yesterday Jenny and I met to work on a proposal for another. Our estimate was substantially above the rough budget that the client had floated, but we’ve got a range of ideas of how they could fund it, other outcomes we could demonstrate that might justify an increased spend, etc. I really enjoy working on plans like that, expanding the vision of what a project could be and really hope this one works out.

We also have a new officemate. Ben Griffiths will be joining us next week and we’re very glad to have him. Not only is it a relief to have the rent distribution a bit closer to what we’d hoped, but it’s always fun to have new people, new ideas and new energy in the space. There’s one desk remaining for a full time occupant, plus we’re keeping a couple of spares in case anyone needs a short-term workspace in town.

The train’s not quite ready to pull out of the station and I’ve already covered everything I planned to. So I should sign off and decide whether to settle back with an In Our Time podcast, or get some work out of the way first…