It seems like it’s time to give this another go.
With justinian and the Greenbelt relaunch over, this week has continued along the lines of the rest of April with a return to juggling a whole host of smaller projects.
Work for the James Lind Library continues apace, and while we’re still some way off the full overhaul we’re dreaming of there’s now a set of content management tools in place that will let us prepare the library for that day. It’s been quite a process of mapping, deconstructing and reconstructing the content, and while there’s plenty more of that to do we’ve got enough of a grasp that our guesses of how to move forward are now of the informed variety.
There’s also a very exciting project for a record label I’ve admired for quite a while. It’s been a rush job, but it’s shaping up well and should launch on Tuesday. More on that next week.
One of the fun parts of these small projects is that they’ve been a chance to work with rails 3 and it’s delightful how far it’s come in the past few months. When I was playing with it over Christmas everything felt a little creaky, but with a few more months work and a lot more plugins ported over, it all feels a lot more solid. In fact, by the middle of next week I should have two or three rails 3 apps in production and an equal number in active development. The speed-ups, new query finders and increased modularisation have all been working out well.
Alongside all of that, there’s been a fair bit of chasing my accountant to try and get last year’s accounts wrapped up, and talking to people about potential new projects. I had a great meeting last Friday with a renowned arts festival that quickly expanded from a very straightforward brief into some much more exciting possibilities, and am just about to start work with an east london arts charity who needed someone to step in and pick up a particularly complex app. Lots of exciting stuff on the horizon, but still more to juggle. I’m quite looking forward to the long weekend.
(by the way, we do still have another desk available in our Shoreditch office. drop me a line if you’d like to join us)