A quiet week spent exploring with my hands.

I continued my explorations of Dokku as a hosting option, spending some time looking at best-practice for deploying Wordpress to it - and then working out how that lined up with my own preferences around deployment (notably, specifying Wordpress as a dependency in composer).

That was a useful exploration - getting hand dirty with some servers, turning something I’d often end up doing by hand into something more automated - and I at least got to something sensible and working by the end of the week.

I spent a day documenting what I’d done. Not ‘documentation’ that resides in the text files I use as a digital notebook; ‘documentation’ other people would find useful. That’s a challenging thing to write clearly and unambiguously. The end result was perhaps too long, but I think it explains itself clearly enough, and includes appropriate code snippets and samples.

I hope I’ll publish that somewhere next week. If nothing else, it was good practice to write some real documentation for something technical, multi-stage, and complex. I’ve got more writing coming up this month, and it was good to get a handle on my pace of writing (and, for technical work, getting a feel for how often I need to bounce between edits and writing). And, who knows, it may still be useful for someone.

On Friday, my circuit boards for Dent arrived from China and I set about assembly. These are the smallest component sets I’ve ever had to assemble - the 0603 is all fine, but the QFN microcontroller has been a pain. (QFN is probably the first of the surface-mount IC packages that is ultra-hard to do by hand, as it has no exposed pins. It’s really designed for a robot and oven to do).

I’ve been practicing with solder paste, stencils, and hot air, and whilst the first stage of my assembly seemed to go OK, the usb socket on the board has possibly not gone in correctly, leading to some powering issues, a very hot chip, and a frustrated me to end the week with.

Still, I have an idea where to take it next week, and I solved a few problems at the firmware/bootloader end for once I’ve got the chip up and running.

Quiet, but busy, and some good studio conversations with my colleagues throughout.