Weeknotes are late. It didn’t seem the right time on Monday 1st June to be prattling about my work practice or the landscape technology on the internet. Make some space for more important messages and voices to be heard.

At the beginning of week 386, we presented where we were to the team - the output of some discovery work - and we began to formulate a plan for the next steps. And here, I struggled with premise rejection: looking at the brief, reacting to it based on the discovery, and realising every bone in me wants to pivot away from it. The brief is for X; my (not necessarily correct) instinct is to say “…how about (something that is emphatically not-X)?”

Rather than being the thing I should do, this is a feeling I have to sit with for a bit and own. Sometimes, it’s just down to a bump to my confidence. I am put out by something I have discovered; an unforseen challenge has emerged; whatever has emerged is something I am afraid of. And whatever it is, I just have to work through it.

At the end of the week, I worked through it a bit on my own, and then shared my thoughts with my colleague. Fortunately, we both agreed on where we were. The discovery phase had, in fact, worked: we had learned a lot, and perhaps needed to pivot a little. What the full details of that pivot were, were unclear, but we agreed that it was needed. And we also both had come to similar conclusions about what we had discovered.

There was work to be done, but there was no need to panic entirely.

What then followed over the next few weeks was continuing to work through that. We spoke to a variety of peers through the organisation, shared where we were, and took some of their feedback on for the next chunk. I continued to sketch in paper and code.

And we chose a direction. Not quite the direction that would take us through to the very end, but a direction to take us along the next part of the journey. We’d take the discovery work and continue to explore and polish with it, just as planned, delivering a first phase that was roughly in line with what we’d promised: see it through, and work up our ideas in more detail. Then, we’d veer off: rather than treating the next two phases as incremental on the first, we’d address two other areas that had emerged in a similar manner. The second phase is feeling relatively clear in terms of topic, if nothing else; the third is perhaps vaguer, but might be shaped over the weeks that preceed it.

Phase one needs to wrap up next week, so in week 388, I spent a chunk of time making browser-based prototypes, and thinking about how best to make them self-explanatory. Not in the way a good piece of software is, but in the way a good textbook or exhibit is: the code is our example, but it needs content to situate it alongside it. I’m excited to follow this thread, and explore how to present this kind of work.

And, finally, a nice surprising note. I noticed a small ping from the Slack for Bradnor towards the end of the week, and hurriedly jumped over there to work out what had gone wrong. It turns out: nothing. Rather, a long quiet device gateway had come back online, and the sensors speaking to it had started trickling data into the system automatically and unasked. Exactly how it should have worked, and how it was envisaged. But it’s nice to see something that you had planned to be robust proving its robustness. Happy client, happy me.