Week 111 saw lots of progress on Rubato/Burton. I spent the majority of my time, head town, working through one feature at once.

A lot of the project began from refactoring other people’s code: making the new interactions work with existing data and templates, and then changing the data formats once I realised what I was going to need. As a result, it’s been hard to see the ‘big picture’. I keep having to work through a single feature, get to the end, then come up for air and work out what’s next.

Fortunately, that’s been working well as a process: the number of steps is clear, and I haven’t had to retrace them very often. I’m making the path by walking, essentially. Richard was passing through London on Friday, so he came over to the studio and we worked together a bit – had a chat, and got the code up and running on his laptop.

Before he left, I managed a demo of using the footpedal to advance through steps in a song, with synchronised animation playing out on other screens, and then advancing to a different song using the pedal as well – and the song swapping out on all screens. Which is nearly an end-to-end demo: there’s one big feature left for week 112.

I say this a lot: sometimes it’s hard to see that end goal when I’m in the middle of a particularly hard feature. But the process appears to have worked, and it was great to get to an endpoint at the end of the week.

Otherwise, a few other small issues with another project led to some time spent normalizing somebody else’s messy data, and there were a couple of meetings. I also attended the first meeting of XYZW Club which was really interesting, and some of it even sunk in: I’d upgraded our point renderer to flat triangles shortly after the session.