The majority of the week was spent working on Contributoria (Haddington), following its launch the week before. No major errors to fix, but lots of features to roll out ASAP. It’s very much an “early” beta (rather than a perpetual beta) and we’d like to get the features people are expecting into the product as swiftly as we can; I’m hoping by February/March I’ll be focusing more on polishing and plussing, than on crawling through the critical backlog.

So that meant building core functionality, helping Dan set up outbound email, fettling servers, and getting our deployment tools polished and working for all of us. That went smoothly, and we’re now delivering at a nice pace.

A Monday spent at the Guardian offices also meant that we could show the product off in an editorial meeting, and we had a decent response – some sharp questions and good feedback. At this stage, almost all feedback is helpful, and it was nice to get a response direct from all the journalists on tap in those offices.

I also spent a little of the week debugging some issues with Seager, primarily around latency. Connected object need a degree of polish in their mere implementation to file off rough edges, even in this early prototype: how often they report to the network, what first configuration feels like. Lots of that’s been ironed out, and I’m going to talk more to the Bergcloud team next week about my experiences with the project.

And of course, handling email and inquiries about the future – and lining ducks up for the tax payment deadline.