Three main pieces of work this week.

Over on Cleeve, I continued write-ups of projects. They’re nearly done – although the largest ones are still left – and I need to dig out some imagery and artwork at some point.

I spent a while on the Silicon Labs board, hacking up this Longcrag project. A good chat with a friend convinced me it might be worth prodding it for longer. If it’s a goer, it’d be interesting to see if I could manufacture a physical product properly – a short run, for retail sale. That’d be an interesting way to learn a lot of things, even with a relatively niche product.

I’ve been battling C – learning more about structs, getting better at writing headers, and tearing my hair out about the quality of documentation. The Silicon Labs stuff is pretty well documented, too! It’s just not quite what I’m used to, and it’s been a long while since I’ve been stuck for hours on what feel like the most basic of problems. At the end of the week, I had most of the functionality done, but everything decided to stop working once I moved the code into the release profile. So there’s a bit more to be done there.

Selworthy saw a huge release. I’d been working on a parallel track since late summer, overhauling some of the underlying concepts and conceits – real foundational stuff that would have a knock-on to all the higher-level systems. Some of the change was, for a while, a bit experimental, but once the experiment looked like it’d come to fruition, it was time to cloose the loop. This week, I merged 291 commits into master. The merge was relatively seamless, thanks to regular rebasing, some code review with colleagues, and freezing our master branch shortly before the deployment.

The dev team deployed it early on Thursday morning. It was pretty seamless for a deploy involving small team distributed around the world, a moderate amount of DNS wrangling, and a long-ish data migration. We’d rehearsed the process on a set of rehearsal servers, and that helped iron out the kinks of the data changes. By 9am Thursday, Selworthy was running in its new world. We had almost no glitches post-launch, and users were already commenting enthusiastically on new features that day. A big job, well done, and it frees us up to do less infrastructural work in future.

Some good impromptu chats in the week, too, including a nice coffee with Johanna who was working down the hallway. We compared notes notes on design process and practice – good stuff, and great to step away from the C for a while.