Week 25. Which, indexing from zero, is the 26th week. Which means I’ve been doing this half a year.

I think it’s going alright.

The majority of this week was spent on Detling, building invitation systems that allow people to alert friends to concerts they’d like to talk about or listen to together.

Creating invitations is very straightforward. Handling acceptance is harder.

For this prototype, we’re just using email for sign-in, and a way of identifying who to send invitations to. So that leads to the situation that Dropbox has solved well: you an accept an invite to one address from another one that has a valid Dropbox account. That means even if your friend only knows your work email, you’ll be able to accept the email from the home account you signed up to Detling with. And, of course, if they invited the account that Detling already knows about, the invite can appear on your homepage, dashboard, etc.

So that’s what this week focused on: a lot of workflow, and everything necessary to support it. I spent some time running my planned solutions by other members of the team. Though they’re not developers, I find it helps me to think out loud, to check I’ve not made any strange assumptions. This is a bit like rubber ducking, but the feedback you get from another person is always positive.

It’s also a really useful way to start sharing and disseminating project knowledge. I have to explain my Domain Language clearly, and by ensuring that we’ve agreed on not only the solution but also the diagnosis of the problem, I know I’m not wasting time. We have a enough time to measure many times – but only to cut once.

Fortunately, everything appears to be proceeding well, and everyone working on the project is providing useful steerage, insight and ideas. Fizzing along nicely.

And then: a little bit of hacking on an early prototype for Playable City, which is coming together a little – and also exposing some of the awkward seams and edges of our original idea – and a few meetings.

Finally, a conference; I spent Saturday at Ruby Manor, which has always been both a great workout for the brain and a lovely social occasion. This year was no exception: well run, thoughtful, diverse, and a huge crowd of programmers and friends. I left with lots of things to think about, and some notes to myself about where to go with Detling in the margins of my notebook.