Fortnightnotes, owing to a long weekend away over the bank holiday.

At the end of week 296, Lambrigg had its own internal demo; Tim and I were cranking fairly hard to get that done – three days of code, audio recording, hasty art direction and game design.

The demo went very well: really well received, clearly understood, and loads of good questions (which is always a good sign). Initially I was relieved – everything worked, we met our goals – but I also left the demo highly satisifed with the positive response and enthusiastic feedback: I thought we’d done a fair pile of work to get it to where it was, and the team communicated that they could see that. So that’s great. Tim and I regrouped at the beginning of week 297 to set direction for the final phase of the project, and that’s now underway.

Only one day on Selworthy this fortnight. I sat down with Erik and we went over his first spike of some heavy front-end replacement work he’s been doing. This ended up being a great day of remote pairing, with two notable successes. Firstly, the brief feedback I had so far was resolved easily and by the pair of us, and this proved that the new code was much more maintainable. We could add features and develop atop it easily – one of the things we hoped would be true already proving itself. And secondly, I managed to transfer a lot of knowledge to Erik about the next steps for that code – not just what would need doing, but how the systems he was replacing would work. Lots of things trapped in tangly Javascript and my head now out and shared in the world. I’m really looking forward to seeing the team’s progress with this pile of code in week 298.

The bank holiday weekend extended a few days either side for family obligations, and then, just as I got back to work in week 297, I had a day sick at home with a brief headcold. Annoying! I recovered over the weekend, so week 298 begins on Monday (with these notes).