Blog posts

So I’ve clearly fallen off the weeknote wagon. A big, new, exciting project came up a few weeks back and almost everything has slipped as we’ve dug into it. We’re working with a much bigger team than usual, in a different location to usual. It’s quite a change. There has been time to slip out one new site: a simple presence for Sheridan Tongue’s soundtracks to the BBC series Wonders of the Universe. Sheridan’s contributed the score for both Brian Cox’s “Wonders” series (the latter of which is on TV as I write this) and it’s been great to work with him on getting the site together. ...

A few less meetings this week, but one of those I did squeeze in has led to some fairly rapid results. Tomorrow I’ll be heading down to Lambeth to get started on an intensive project that will occupy most of my time till May. It’s very exciting but a bit hush-hush so I’ll have to be careful what I blog. With that lined up the focus has been on clearing the decks (but not, unfortunately, writing the many blog entries I’ve been meaning to get to). ...

This week has followed in much the same vein as the last. Lots of rushing between meetings, squeezing in the time to do the work that needs to fit around them. There were a couple of exciting meetings about some projects for the coming months, and a slightly harder one trying to figure out whether there’s a realistic business model around a product we’ve been exploring over the past few months. And an afternoon learning a little about Nokia’s new developer platform (on which more, later). ...

A little over three years ago I wrote a piece entitled " Assessing Drupal as a Rails developer." In it I attempted to lay out a few of the reasons why I found Ruby on Rails a much more comfortable platform for building web applications than Drupal. Over the intervening years, Drupal has continued to grow in popularity, and recently we’ve seen the release of Drupal 7. Rails has seen some radical changes with the release of its third major version, but I must confess I’ve no idea what’s happened with its profile and adoption rate. ...

I lost my way with these back at the end of August, but it feels like it could be helpful to start again. So here we go… I’ve spent a fair chunk of the past week travelling around London meeting people for coffee. We’re in a position that’ll be well known to many freelancers and small companies – several jobs coming to an end, but nothing big lined up to replace them – and that’s spurred me to get out and catch up with people, explore possibilities, think about what’s next and expand our networks a little bit. ...

My officemate Matt has spent the past few weeks putting together the inaugural History Hack Day, which took place at the Guardian offices last weekend. I was only able to attend for the kick-off talks, but they were great, with Matt Sheret’s exhortation to be timelords fitting especially well. Jeremy Keith has done a great job of writing up the various hacks that emerged from the weekend and I’m gradually working my way through them. I’ve very much enjoyed watching Simon’s geStation which plots the openings of Britain’s railway stations onto a google map. As Jeremy says: ...

Last Monday I was at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills to explore the government’s “Tech City” scheme to do something to do with the technology industry in an area loosely defined as “East London”. I’d been wondering before sitting down to write this how best to sum up my reservations about the scheme, not really realising that just writing that first sentence would actually begin to draw them out quite quickly. An initiative has been announced, a name has been given, but very few people seem to actually be sure what is being proposed, or where or at whom it’s targeted. That made it very hard to work out how to engage with the event. ...

One of the projects that occupied the latter half of my 2010 was the build and launch of News Sauce. It’s an aggregator product that we’ve built on drupal and initially launched to pull together news coming out of the UK government. It’s been ticking along very nicely for a couple of months now and has been very well received. Which is nice. Over the weekend there was a little surge of attention as a result of UK Gov Camp and that prompted me to write a blog entry I’ve been promising for a couple of months. So if you want to know a little more about the tech behind the site you can now find my first notes over on the News Sauce blog. ...

I’ve been musing on Mike Kuniavsky’s notes from his Microsoft Social Computing Symposium for a few days. While his focus is ostensibly on physical products and our focus remains very much on web products it’s a helpful read since that distinction is an increasingly flexible one. because these things are now connected, their value moves from the device to the service it represents, and the actual objects become secondary. They become what I call service avatars. A camera becomes a really good appliance for taking photos for Flickr, while a TV becomes a nice place to run a high res Flickr widget, and a phone becomes a convenient way to take your Flickr widget on the road. People see “through” each device to the service it represents, devaluing the device to nearly nothing. ...

Adding Actions to Devise Controllers It wasn’t the most fun I could imagine having during a “holiday season” but while holed up in Chicagoland over Christmas I spent a couple of days porting a few of my older Rails apps to use a more up to date stack: Rails 3, Devise, Inherited Resources, Formtastic, etc. The idea is that if the apps are on a stack I use every day, I’ll spend less of my time reloading old tools into my head when the inevitable tweaks are required. We’ll see how that goes. ...