• Weeks 187-190

    25 August 2016

    Busy, busy, lemon busy.

    Week 187 was spent on leave, which was much appreciated, before returning into Holmfell.

    In the past three weeks, Holmfell has really come a long way: from Times-New-Roman debug screens to something that’s alive, making illustrations and talking for itself. (Gosh, it’s going to be much easier to talk about this when it’s in the world).

    It’s an art project that generates media artefacts, and whilst a lot of the process has been about writing the code to build those objects, almost an equal amount is the part of the iceberg that’s beneath the water: code to filter content we don’t think’s appropriate, code to behave as a good citizen of the internet, code to comply with API rules and rate limits, code to make it easier to be controlled and monitored by the team.

    And then, just when I’m up to my eyeballs in monit and Ansible and configuring servers, I pinball back to making prose-generation and phantomjs play ball. The project, as with so much of my work, touches lots of the stack.

    It’s also a bit of an intense burst of work, which is perhaps why weeknotes have fallen by the wayside. But suffice to say: still here, still beavering away. September sees Holmfell launching, a proper holiday away from screens, and then getting into the swing of a project that’ll fill up my time in October, alongside other responsibilities.

    As ever: onwards.