Week 100 pulled me in three directions, all of which needed a fair amount of attention to complete before a holiday in week 101.

On the Wednesday, I went to Watershed’s Making the City Playable conference, and delivered a slightly tweaked version of Driftwood. I had lots of great conversations, especially during the Open Sessions, and it was a pleasure to catch up with several friends and colleagues I’d not seen for a while. Sadly, I couldn’t stay for the second day.

I spent Thursday wrapping up Ruardean, delivering wireframes, slides, and a technical brief for the digital component of the theatre show. Hopefully it builds on what Bohdan, Ben and I discussed the week before, and will act as firm foundation for what’s to come. They’re running a Scratch at BAC next week, and they’ll talk a bit about the digital component on the Friday night. (I’m away for week 101, hence shipping early).

And there rest of the week was Swarmize/Abberley. I began the week writing siege-like scripts to bombard Swarmize with results, to get a feel for how the site functioned with a more realistic volume of data. This quickly led to some front-end changes, and also provided the foundation for building a first prototype of time-series graphs.

We integrated a Cloudfront CDN set-up, in order to cache stylesheets and (more importantly) CSV files for completed swarms. I overhauled some out-dated backend code, and worked with Graham on a shared piece of data that affected both the Scala and Ruby apps.

Sadly, the Swarm we were going to run in public during week 101 fell through – but at the very end of the week, another opportunity presented itself, and we focused on rigging things up to make it work. We’re really keen to test Swarmize with live data, and as the first live test runs through week 101, it’ll give us a better of understanding of what to design around – and what the editors work with it need.

A good week 100: lots of balls in the air, and now they need to be caught appropriately in the coming weeks.