A good week. Much of it was spent on Hutton: a personal project I’m building to demonstrate some concepts for a talk. By the end of the week, I’d got a very solid web-based prototype, sketched out how the hardware version would work, and begun poking the hardware version into life:

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When not working on Hutton, I spent a day and half with Max Gadney and After The Flood in a pair of workshops. Both had great teams assembled, and it was a pleasure to explore and examine the concepts we were working on.

I was also very taken with Max’s “one rule” for workshops, which he detailed in an email beforehand:

The only rule is no swearing. I believe swearing shuts the brain down – focusses on the fight/flight imperative – and we need to be the opposite – synaptic anemones, happily tendrilling. And if swearing is not really allowed, then the opposite runs true: that I would encourage comedy, humour and jollity. It is good for the mind. Laughing clears the mind and opens it up to possibility.

You know what: I think he has a point. Even when used for emphasis or as part of jokes, it unwraps a particular facet of the brain. And by moving away from it, we stayed on a kind of focus, and told different kinds of jokes. We also managed – thanks to some generous contributions to the swearbox from Max – to buy coffee for everyone involved by 4pm. But it was a good insight that I think made the work better, and, I think, one I will institute in other workshops from now on.

What else did I do this week? Emails, of course. Many emails, and a pile of invoicing.

Oh, and it was announced that I’ll be speaking at O’Reilly’s Solid conference in May, over in San Francisco. More about that in my post on the subject.