Week 88, and kick-off on Lewesdon.

Lewesdon is entirely greenfield: we started breaking ground on it on Tuesday. There’s a definite broad overview of what we’re doing, and we made some decent headway on beginning to understand how the architecture of the project was going to have to be shaped.

That still doesn’t answer what the product is, though, and there are a lot of specifics to pin down there: how to make it communicable, and from that broad overview make it usable. The shape of the product is such that the end-user largely shouldn’t care about the underlying architecture – which is good, because the architecture doesn’t necessarily resemble the intent.

On the first day, Graham – the other developer and architect on this – and I drew up some broad architecture diagrams, and cut some very basic code: an outward-facing app and UI talking to a back-end service, written in our languages of choice (Ruby and Scala, respectively). The demo was simple, but it was a useful collaboration exercise, and also useful to prod some assumptions.

But I then began stepping back from code: how does all the configuration and management of this manifest to end users? And that’s been a hard question to answer. The only way to make forward movement is to make some assumptions, and start drawing at a reasonable level of detail. As I sketch, new questions arise that need answering, or discrepancies creep in that I have to assess. And, eventually, I share the sketch, we pick it apart, and I start again. It’s slow moving, but it’s the only way I know to think through this: to think with a pen or stylus, and then see how hot or cold I am.

Friday saw a couple of breakthroughs here, late in the day, after a day of sketching that led to some chats with Matt M, and I’m hoping they’ll help me start week 89 at a bit of a run. We’ll get there, but right now, I’m just going to keep chipping away.

Otherwise, I spent Week 88 exploring some feasibility for a quick sketch, and confirming a few other small pieces of work – which required me to plan out my calendar for the summer in some detail. It turns out that I now know that in quite some detail, and I am pretty much full up until November – primarily Lewesdon at the Guardian, and then smaller consultancy and workshops around this.

From a business-and-financial perspective, that’s a relief; from a work perspective, it’s going to be busy and full of exciting challenges; but it also means that I’m going to be quieter for a bit. Less to show, because I’m head down working on things. The good kind of quiet.

Now, the task is to do the work, giving it space to breathe and flow.