Another week of beavering away at Hutton: deploying code onto a VPS, getting PostGIS up and running on my server. Spending quite a bit of time in the shell bumping things into life.

The good news is that lots of the projects on the VPS are now ticking away nicely, after a few days wrestling packages and crontabs into shape, so that’s good. And it looks like Hutton’s server and web components are good to go: enough to prototype and test with, for certain, and to build the hardware backend on.

I spent Monday in Brighton whilst the folks at Lighthouse used the Literary Operator for a photoshoot. That gave me time to catch up with some friends and colleagues, and also think hard about the problems in Hutton away from London.

I also spent some time sketching in code on a selection of work I’m calling Wingreen. This is entirely a visual piece of art, displayed and manipulated in software. Each sketch takes me around an hour, because the platform isn’t quite my natural medium. Each sketch also is telling me that there’s something interesting here, but I haven’t quite cracked it yet, so I’m going to keep iterating. Good to take some time to make something that’s purpose is being aesthetically satisfying.

A week focused on self-initiated projects, then – what I call ‘personal projects’ that are actually part of my working practice, rather than just Stuff For Me. I hope to be able to show Hutton soon, and Wingreen eventually.

A short week, too, because of Easter. Where possible, I try to stick to taking Bank Holidays: I may be freelance, but it suits everybody else in my life, and (as Michael Lopp has pointed out), time off is important to one’s working practice, not just to one’s energy reserves. So a slightly shorter week 79 – and a shorter week 80 to come next week, too.