Posts tagged weeknotes
Week 131
Mar 28th
I’m never quite sure how to start these things. When (as this week) I’m catching up from having missed a week I’m inclined to say something about how the situation is an indication of how the past fortnight has been. But that’s already feeling a little tired. I need to get into the habit of just writing something quick if in the midst of a specially busy/fractured week, and probably just dive in the rest of the time.
The big news of the past week is that the refresh of the Greenbelt website that we’ve been working on for the past few weeks went live on Friday. As I mentioned last time, it feels like an important step (even though much of the structure is unchanged). The festival’s really been realising over the past couple of years the volume and value of content produced and captured over that one weekend each August, and the appetite among festivalgoers for more regular content, and the prominence of the blog and the new ‘media’ section are a reflection of that. We’re also really pushing the Dispatches newsletter and have reworked the design of that, moved it to Campaign Monitor, and extended its reach to about 10x the previous subscriber list. I’m very hopeful that this work will provide a really strong base for ongoing growth.
That’s my second site launch of the month; I think I may have forgotten to mention that the Street Action site was also relaunched a few weeks back. We’re bringing news to the fore, with a stronger emphasis on photos and videos. That was particularly important as the organisation presented their key research project in parliament and was deeply involved in the highly successful Street Child World Cup over the past few weeks. There’s a lot more we want to do, but again it feels like a good step forward.
Other than those two there have been some odds and ends for Generous and a couple of other clients, but the real emphasis has continued to be on Justinian. It’s coming together as we enter the final week, and we’ve been working very successfully with SVG to lay out a relatively complex set of data in a cleanly scalable manner. Having kept half-an-eye on SVG for years it’s been refreshing to see how smoothly it’s worked in modern browsers. (We’re generating the SVG using a Rails 3 backend). It was specially good to have Ben Griffiths join us for a few days – his experience running a software team was really helpful, and he challenged a few assumptions in a manner that set us on a much more fruitful path.
So the coming week will hopefully see us wrapping up Justinian, a little more work on DAPI, and then a few days’ break. This past week I was supposed to attend the Ecampaigning Forum in Oxford, but I didn’t make it as I’d worn myself out with work (and the effects of a toddler who decided to take a few days off from sleeping). The idea of a long weekend off is very attractive.
Weekend Links
Mar 14th
My web browser has been groaning under the weight of all the tabs that have mounted as I’ve not gotten round to one of these purges for a few weeks. So it’s time to share, ease the pressure and free up some RAM along the way.
This whole NoSQL thing continues to draw a lot of attention across the tech blog world. Thoughtbot have a piece about their use of Redis which serves as a nice step through basic uses of that store. Vineet Gupta has attempted a more detailed and wide ranging review of the current options – it’s an interesting read, but I do increasingly wonder why so many of the arguments for non-relational data stores seem to be focussed on performance when there’s an equally strong “right tools for the right job” line that comes of realising not everything necessarily maps to MySQL.
There are a range of tools around to ease the process of testing multiple Rails apps on OS X. The latest to cross my radar is Passenger Preference Frame (via Tom Armitage). I generally use hostess and script/server but this could be handy in a few settings.
Engine Yard have had a great serious of articles on the Rails/Merb merger and the piece of ORM agnosticism was yet another indication of the goodness coming with Rails 3. Also on a Rails 3 tip, the new approach to scopes in ActiveRecord looks like it’ll help me clean up a lot of code – there’s a good introduction on EdgeRails.info.
It looks like a number of handy features are coming in wordpress 3 – I like the sound of the new menu system, though given how short the RC phase for the 2.9 release was (and unsurprisingly how quickly defects were found in the final release) I’m going to be cautious about upgrading.
There’s been a round of thoughtful posts about interface metaphors inspired by the imminent arrival of the iPad. It all started with Marco Arment’s “Overdoing the Interface Metaphor” and noteworthy responses came from Chris Clark and Neven Mrgan. (Thanks to Matt Jones for the initial pointer). Along related lines, Craig Mod has a well considered piece on Books In The Age Of The iPad.
With so many of us using flash blockers to save our computers from being eaten whenever we open web pages with the inevitable flash widgets a problem does arise when some judicious use of flash is called for. Mark Pilgrim’s responded with flashblockdetector, a javascript utility that can be used to present an argument for why your use of javascript actually deserves unblocking (via Simon Willison).
Top link of late for simplicity and beauty has to be flickrflow:
We began with a collection of photographs of the Boston Common taken from Flickr. Using an algorithm developed for the WIRED Anniversary visualization, our software calculated the relative proportions of different colors seen in photos taken in each month of the year, and plotted them on a wheel.
And because I should mention other work going on in our office building, it sounds like the BBC are enjoying having tinker work with them on ‘next generation remotes‘. They also attributed Tom Taylor’s powers to ‘a group of software coding friends’ in a piece on Newspaper Club. Meanwhile James made a book I wish I’d had when I went to SxSW last year.
Week 129
Mar 13th
So. No week notes again last week. It was a week of juggling numerous projects, trying to get the month’s job list under control before diving into the project that is to dominate March. Writing here was the ball that got dropped.
One of the big jobs on the agenda has been implementing a redesign of various parts of the Greenbelt website. It was important to get it under way as it was one of those pieces which are easiest to get a feel for once you’ve made a start. It’s also quite satisfying to work on as it pulls together a number of strands that represent how the organisation has been changing and growing, but which the current site doesn’t really allow for.
Another is codenamed DAPI and is my first deployment on Rails 3. It’s a funny project in that we hope it’ll have a very short life. It’s all about transforming data that’s been stored with very little structure. Once the structured form of the data has been signed off it’ll be time to retire DAPI and build something new focussed on actually using that data. For now, it’s great to have something taking shape and to have a Rails 3 project under my belt.
The scramble has all been to make way for a larger project that dominates this month. We’re calling it Justinian and it’s been fun so far. The core team beside myself is Matt (whose project it is), Ben, James and Jenny and we’ve spent most of the week gathered around a whiteboard (aside from a field trip to the British Museum) figuring out how to represent a fairly complex set of calendar-ish data in a way that encourages both exploration and utilisation. I think we’re moving towards a good product, but it’s going to be a busy couple of weeks trying to translate it all into a functional prototype.
There’s also been a reminder this week that I need to step up the suite of monitoring tools at my disposal. god’s generally doing a good job of keeping processes up and running. Munin lets me see if servers are over capacity. But there are a lot of more fine-grained details (are search indexes updating as expected, are emails going out smoothly) that aren’t well covered by those tools or by my automated testing stack. I’m hoping that somewhere along the line there’ll be time to find a solution for that, perhaps something presenting a status dashboard?
Week 127
Feb 26th
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…
Week 125
Feb 10th
I had planned to write last week’s notes on Wednesday in the ninety minutes I had free between meetings. But then another meeting came along and ate that time. By Sunday I decided it was time to give in and just skip a week. Now it’s Wednesday again and I’m sitting on a train heading to Reading to meet with my accountant so it’s time to actually get something down.
In free moments I was contemplating code names for projects. It feels like I keep making vague references to projects in the pipeline, but while reluctant to refer to specific clients and without another way to name them it’s hard to be more specific. So I’ve been throwing around a few ideas, but not settled on anything for sure. Perhaps I should just make them up as-and-when, but the idea of having some theme really appeals.
As I’d hoped, February has seen a reduction in the amount of juggling. Each day of the past two weeks has had a major theme even when I’ve tried to fit smaller requests in around the edges. I like working that way: take an hour or two in the morning to get through email, make small fixes, and so on, and then allow the rest of the day to be focussed around a single project. That’s hard to maintain when a lot of projects require some level of maintenance, but I remain optimistic.
The meeting with my accountant is to begin to think about how the business might develop in the coming months. There are various arrangements that I suspect could be much simpler but I need a little advice there. And then the rest of the day will likely be spent on planning out a few projects, some for clients, some not, and figuring out how to help one (music industry) client build their revenues up to a point where they can actually afford the work they want us to do.
Tomorrow I’ll be back to working on a brainstorming app for a client. From their perspective we’re working on completing a first iteration, from mine this is the third. Either way it’s moving along. And then Friday promises to be interesting as we meet with the publisher of the book tied into the JLL project to discuss how we can have the web and the book play off each other well, without creating too much work for authors or editors.
For now, I see a suite of Oracle buildings passing on my right and a Staples coming up on my left, which means I’m arriving into Reading and it’s time to sign off.