Lots of work on Willsneck this week, to bring it into land. We wrapped everything up by Thursday PM, and I’ve got a half-day on this left over to finalise the production deployment. Happy with how it’s turned out, I think.

Hallin got merged into master by the client, so I’m looking forward to hearing how they get on with it in production.

I had a good chat with Christian and Miguel from Schema who were in town, having been introduced by a friend. Always nice to meet new people, and interesting to chat to them about designing for data, working with clients on that problem, and the tools used to do it. Thanks to Steve for putting us in touch!

Finally, I spent some of Friday working on Mayhill, and had a really big breakthrough. That breakthrough is what we called end-to-end at Berg: a complete workflow up and running, even if every component is a bit ‘version one’. I began by working on overhauling some of the browser-based UI: making it look a lot tidier, and refactoring a lot of the large App.svelte file into smaller components, including a big wrapper component for handling the MIDI context. Then, I wrote the JavaScript to translate edits in the browser to Sysex data. Finally, back in firmware-land, I wrote the firmware code to intercept that stream of data and write it to Flash RAM. There were other small firmware kinks to iron out, too.

By the end of the day, I had a system where you could open an editor in your browser, connect a physical object (that I’d both designed the electronics for and coded the firmware on) and see it appear automatically, and reconfigure it in the browser app. The browser app could transmit edits back to the hardware, which would persist those changes. Hugely satisfying: what’s largely left on this is polish, now, and working on the “1.0” hardware (rather than this ‘development board’) that I built for myself.

Still not quite sure how I feel about Svelte. I like the compiled-up-front approach, especially for something that couldn’t really be done many other ways; I’m not quite sure about its idiosyncratic syntax, and whilst I quite like its two-way reponsiveness, that leads to a propensity to get yourself in a tangle. Still, it’s enabled all the things I’ve needed to do so far in a reasonably straightforward manner, and I’m a big fan of its Vue-style single-file components, so it’ll do for now. One thing in its favour is that it was easy enough to pick up after months away: most of it, most of the time, is just browser-based technologies.

A good week, then: mainly code for clients, some more esoteric code for myself with a serious breakthrough, and some good conversations to round it out.