Another head-down week.

It might seem it’s not so useful to write about the head-down weeks, where I’m chipping away at design or code. I think it’s still worth writing these notes: they’re a useful way of me reflecting on progress, on what could be improved, and a good way to focus back on exactly what happened in the past seven days. It’s rarely as simple as ‘did more X‘; rather, it’s useful to measure the pace of the work.

This was the final full week on Detling, and a lot of my focus was on some final pieces of functionality and bringing it into land. That meant finishing up the design work, as well as beginning to make sure the distributed team were all up to speed on everything that was going on. By the end of the week, several strands of work – production, editorial, testing, design, development – were all motoring forwards in parallel, and it was great to see everything sync up.

I also implemented simple image uploads for some editorial functionality. Heroku, having a read-only filesystem, doesn’t let you upload data through webforms to its servers; you need to store uploads somewhere else, such as S3. However, I continued the theme of gluing services together (as mentioned last week) and set up Cloudinary. Again, a lovely, seamless process: dropping in the gem, plus Carrierwave, and image uploads (along with offline processing/resizing) were integrated. It’s great to see such common modules of functionality extracted to services – and to be implemented so well.

Otherwise, I spent a lot of the week bouncing between vim and the Github issues list – marking things off, leaving notes for myself, and assigning away where appropriate. The pile went down faster than it went up, and I think all’s in a great place for the final few days of code and testing. I’m looking forward to be able to share the work soon.

A couple of brief – but interesting – meetings, one about a talk, another about music and technology, broke up the week. That was 27.