I’ve largely stepped back from Selworthy now, spending a regularly day a week with the team reviewing work, looking at the future, and doing R&D on specific features or technologies.

However, I’ve taken on a short project for the client in the run-up to Easter. An old, abandoned library turned out to not be cutting the mustard for us, so I’m working on building a replacement. It’s exactly the sort of project I enjoy: gnarly text and character processing, working to a well-defined (if complex) spec for the format, neatly stand-alone and greenfield, and with obvious measures of success.

It’s also been a chance to learn a few new things; I’ve enjoyed working with the bindata gem a lot, which has made processing binary files far more straightforward and has also given me a parser for the format at the same time as building a formatter for it – nicely two-way.

By the end of the week, I was parsing the format correctly, and had started to break the back of encoding the format. I’d imagine there’s another handful of days to go – first to finish up the first pass at encoding, and then a lot of fettling to match the sample files we’re working to, and the nuanace of the spec.

Over on Longcrag, a bunch of cables arrived from China, and so an hour with some cutters got another Foxfield product bagged up and ready to go to wholesale. Now I’m just waiting on a final set of front panels for one product – on Monday, I found what looks like a much better way to avoid the fabrication issues I found in Week 273 without having to change supplier. We’ll know by next week. I also started working down my Trello board of what’s left on the second phase of products, which has been stalled for far too long and needs bringing into land pronto. It turns out, a chunky Trello board helped enumerate what was left, and give me easy threads to latch onto and start moving into the DONE column. Good stuff.