Lots going on, so weeknotes in haste:

I spent about half this fortnight working on some new features for Selworthy expanding on our speech-to-text functionality; this led to some new features still in the prototype stages, but that already seem pretty promising. Some rough edges to be solved in Week 197, but a good feature out there.

I also started work on a more complex feature that involves spinning up a new web service, as well as extending another. As a result, much of the programming work hasn’t been so much ‘typing’ as ‘pacing and thinking’ – working out how all these boxes will talk to one another, and when. It seems like I’m not typing enough – and then I come to the typing and realise all the thinking was the real work, and has paid off. That feature’s going to take a little more pacing, but so far, it’s proceeding well.

Three more days in week 196 with Good Form and Spectacle, which I started spending writing a pile of code to denormalise a lot of database dumps into large JSON objects, and ended exploring those objects in our Elasticsearch cluster. A chunky bit of work that, along with the work done by my other colleagues, sets us up to explore and describe this information.

I’d have done more in Week 195, but I was laid low by a cold that turned a flexible, easy end of the week into one mainly spent asleep; illness is a frustrating thing when one’s freelance, and I was lucky I had the space to cushion that impact; understanding clients also help.

Back on the bounch, though, and so onto Week 197.