Another week cranking hard on Lewesdon.

Graham, the other developer on the project, is on a well-earned holiday, so I’ve had two weeks to push the website that most people are going to utilise and experience quite far forward. It’s very much a working wireframe, extending Bootstrap just enough to do what we want, and to understand the pathways through the site. I’m also off the project during week 95, so I was aiming to leave it in a state where he’d be able to pick things up on his end of things – the Scala tools that are going to do some of the crunchier, high performance work.

This week, that meant adding things like authentication – so that Guardian users can log in with their own accounts – and making sure the alpha UI is coherent and functional. I also took some time to write quite a lot of tests, getting the ball rolling for me writing more in future, and also to cover a complex set of functionality: setting the “open” and “close” timestamps for “swarms”, our large-scale surveys. A useful exercise, and it immediately lifted my confidence in my code.

By the end of the week, much of the deck we’d been using to explain the site had been replaced by functioning code: just in time for a demo with the Editor. He was enthusiastic and asked useful, pertinent questions, which we’ve added to the list of editorial feedback. In a couple of weeks, we’ll be showing the work so far to everyone who’s offered us tips.

For the rest of the week, I was prepping for Week 95’s workshop: one large talk and one small to write, along with making sure we had a working timetable. By Friday, I had a decent schedule spreadsheeted up and shared with my collaborators, and a decent draft of my talk about digital media. Come Sunday, I’d be on a train to Newcastle.