Whoops, missed a week. I’ve been intensely head-down on the first phase of Easington.

It always takes me a while to settle into the pace of new projects. I’m eager to start, keen to make headway. It also takes me a while to settle into the pace of new clients: how do they like to work? What are their expectations? What’s the cadence of us meeting, talking, and then me orbiting off to do some work, or sitting down to collaborate.

And that’s all heightened by doing everything remotely from the get-go. (I’m used to working at a distance, or independently, but still relish collaboration, colocation, and thinking in-person when possible).

So I spent the past two weeks “cranking the handle”, so to speak.

But: they’ve been a very rewarding two weeks. I’ve had regular catchups with my Primary Colleague, and have been bouncing up and down the powers of ten that my favourite kind of R&D projects tend to require: from gathering background research, speaking to colleagues, and reading papers through to thinking-out-loud, sketching interactions and ideas, and then, at the far end, pulling one particularly meaty thought together in code as a working, end-to-end prototype.

That code project took up most of the end of week 384 and all of 385. I proposed that we Just Build A Thing with a particular technology so that we could get a visceral grasp on what it could do. We know what it can do in theory, but it’d be good to feel that for ourselves in a real-world environment. That’ll help us and our stakeholders make strategic decisions about the next steps of the project, as well as help us understand the material we’re working with. It’s also a little gift: something to share back to the team for them to use themselves.

A lot of that’s come down to the cardboard-and-tape of web technologies, but that’s an exciting space at the weird edges. I’ve poked a bit at Functions As A Service before - AWS Lamba, Cloud Functions - but in this case have been using Cloud Run to apply that idea to a whole Docker container (for $REASONS). A whole container, spun up from cold start, in under a second, to do something on demand, die when it’s done, and we only get billed for compute time. There was still also a chunk of code to write, but a lot of the code for this project is really infrastructure: the lines between things on the block diagram. Once the pipes were set up, we were running an interesting workflow largely on on-demand hosting. None of that is the meat of what’s going on, of course, but it’s still been instructive to put to use, rather just to understand impassively.

So whilst I was motoring through that, I was also wrapping my head around a new problem domain, one specific problem, a new client, a new project, and a pile of misbehaving code (all written by me, obviously). And so weeknotes slipped, albeit for good reason. Still: good to drop a note at the end of what felt like a good fortnight and say “that felt like a good fortnight”. At the end of it, I had a rewarding, curious, and thought-provoking prototype, ready to demo next week.

Next week we’ll present where we are and go from there.