A short week to report on.

On Monday, I spent the morning with Caper, taking part in a workshop to help an organisation understand what Culture Hack might look like for them.

I spend Tuesday and Wednesday poking at the edges of Sore, and working over some month-end admin. Sam (from PAN) and I also met up with James from Twilio on Tuesday, to chat about how Hello Lamp Post has been going , and to talk to them more generally. Twilio’s APIs provide all the telephony and SMS services for Hello Lamp Post; it’s not an understatement to say that it wouldn’t exist in its current form without their services, and they’ve been helping us out with it since launch. It was great to catch up, and hear more about their plans for the future.

As I write, it’s Thursday, and I’m typing this in a tent in Dorset, lit by a small lantern and my iPad’s screen. I’m on holiday, and thus weeknotes are early – though will likely arrive late, thanks to the vagaries of rural network access.

Holidays are important. I’ve always tried to treat freelancing as a real job, work decent hours, and take weekends and holidays. I do OK at the first, and perhaps better at the second – though I don’t force myself to stop if I’m on a roll, or enjoying myself; sometimes, the Sunday mornings spent typing are where breakthroughs come. But I’ve found holidays hard, partly because there have been too many good things that I couldn’t say no to passing by.

Anyhow, lots of things are in good places, so I decided a long weekend wouldn’t hurt anybody, and I’m off camping by the sea. Just a small break, but it’s largely away from connectivity and glowing screens, which feels like a wise thing (I’m mainly just using my Kindle to read off – a lack of mains adaptors does quite a lot for time away from screens that glow). So far, I’ve been very happy doing very little, and I hope it will leave me refreshed.

Back early next week – which, I hope, will see the next head-down burst of progress on Sore.

I’m going to be speaking at LDNIA in August. The talk’s called The Material World, and is a prototype – or “radio edit”, if you like – of my forthcoming talk at Webdagene:

The modern designer works with more materials than ever before. Not just tangible materials, such as the web, or desktop software, or the smartphone; also, intangible ‘immaterials’ such as data, time, radio, and the network.

To design well with materials, be they tangible or not, we need to be conversant in them, acutely aware of their capabilities. How do we develop that familiarity?

Through a process of material exploration. Not just reading the documentation or making a few drawings – but feeling their grain under your fingernails. To understand the nature of materials, you can’t just look at them. You have to play with them. Tom will, through some of his own work, look at what materials are (and can be); the value of material exploration, and how to approach it; and the value of playing with materials – the value of toymaking.

Tickets are usually quite limited, but are available now. If you’re coming, it’ll be great to see you.

Weeknotes for Week 41 will be brief, I think, if only because they’re late.

Lots of little bits this week. My main work for myself this week was pushing ahead on Sore; by the end of the week, I had an end-to-end demo video to send to my collaborator and producer. I like video for this simply because it’s a hardware project; ultimately, there should be no visible computation, so being able to show it working end-to-end without manual intervention is exciting progress. Really satisfying work.

I did a short internal talk on Wednesday evening for a company, so a few days were spent rejigging it for the specific new audience. That seemed to go down well.

There was a short piece of work to slowly decommission Concert Club, which has reached the end of its prototype period. It was nice to take the time to wind something down properly: disabling long-running processes, scaling back server resources, leaving it up as an archive. Nothing’s worse than removing a site you worked on from the face of the world, and having to rely on archive.org to recover it.

I had another mentoring session with Michael, the film producer I’m working with through CreateInnovate. Good to catch up, and to see how last month’s session had percolated and come to fruition.

And, on Tuesday, I spent a day with PAN, working over some of the snaglist on Hello Lamppost and thinking a little about the future.

I have one of this weeks every couple of months: lots of little fragments, winding some things down, building others up; it feels bitty at the time, but lots of things move on as a result. It’s the kind of week that makes weeknotes really valuable.

Just before Week 40 began, we’d launched Hello Lampppost. The first week after a project launch is always a hard time to schedule: what problems are going to emerge in production – what are the issues of scale you might not have predicted.

By and large, though, it was a quiet week on Muncaster: a few minor fixes here and there, some performance tweaks, but, touch wood, no crises, which gave me some space to take it easy after Week 39’s exertions.

Not too easy, though – the thoughts at the back of my head that had been pushed to the back because of project-launch were now demanding their own space. That led to pushing several ideas forward:

• noticeable progress on Sore: rigging up all the hardware and proving the CPU doesn’t fall over; building a little “power distribution” board so I can power high current devices and a Raspberry Pi off a single PSU; getting all the necessary libraries in place. This felt like a big leap forward for a single afternoon
• Hacking together a very early prototype of Watchcroft, a game I’m tinkering with for my own sake. A few hours’ work led to a prototype controller (built out of a Freescale FRDM board pretending to be a HID joystick) and a prototype of the game mechanic in Unity. It’s very much not a game yet, but the thing I hoped would be entertaining is, and I think there’s a game to be made out of it. Not for a while though – I think I’m putting this on hold until late September, when a lot more client work is out of the way.
• A small piece of maintenance work on Firle: fixing outdate libraries, adding a piece of functionality that’d been needed for a while, and restoring functionality the broke in library updates. This ended up necessitating some time in Browerstack, which is becoing pretty indispensible (and saves me filling up my SSD with VMs).

So, despite intending to have a quiet, cooling-down week, I ended up doing quite a bit; not as easy to turn my brain off as I’d perhaps hoped, but moved lots of little things forward, and nice to think about other project alongside Hello Lamp Post again. Next week moves into more concerted prototyping/alpha on Sore, and a talk for a client.

Weeknotes are a day late this week – and for good reason.

I spent Week 39 working on Hello Lamp Post – Monday to Wednesday from the studio in Shoreditch, and then decamping to Watershed on Thursday until the beginning of this week to launch the project into the world.

Needless to say, a busy week: lots of features to be wrapped up, content to be refined, and plussing to be done. We hammered our way through the project until well into Saturday night, but come the launch event on Sunday, it was in good shape.

I will be entirely honest: I find launches hard, and do my absolute best to avoid “crunch”: it really doesn’t suit the way I work; long nights tend to introduce as many bugs as I fix. Thankfully, we had a relatively sane launch week (as these things go): lots of teamwork, some late nights working away, lots of eating well, and watching the sun go down from the Arnolfini fairly regularly.

There were, of course, hairy moments (most notably, a strange set of eigenbugs that were solved with the discovery that twilio-ruby isn’t threadsafe). But it all came off in the end. And I’m especially pleased with how effective the final week was: there’s a great deal to be said for getting the team in a single location, with only one thing on our minds. In that final haul, we really moved the project on a lot, and could tell we had something on our hands when we sat playing with it on Saturday night, all chuckling at what was happening in our hands as if it was something alive, and not something we’d made.

I’d primarily been focusing on the technology of the project in that final week, but there’s so much more to it than just the code. There’s the content within the experience; all the marketing and advertising; the graphic branding that’s permeated Bristol; the PR efforts; the beautiful models we’re using as an installation to promote the project; all manner of little details, all of which have come together.

When you’re in the middle of it all, it’s hard to see the whole; I always find that especially hard. I went to the launch party still a bit nervous, waiting for the emails from Exceptional, the people darting up to me with bugs.

And none of that happened. What happened was: people had fun. They surprised us. They told the objects storied, they laughed at the jokes, they were surprised by what one another had said. We drank champagne on College Green, and all was right with the world. By 4pm, I was out of the project-mines, and back in the world, and I could see what we’d made. It was pretty good.

All of which is a long-winded but personal way of saying what launches feel like for me, especially launches of creative works. When you’re in the mine, it’s hard to have any perspective. It’s very satisfying to see the view I got on Sunday when I came out. Thanks to Ben, Gyorgyi, and Sam, the rest of the core Hello Lamp Post team; to Clare, Verity, and all at Watershed; to Justin, our helping hands throughout that final week; and to all the collaborators throughout the project. I’ll write more about it formally soon, but in the context of weeknotes, it’s still important to say these things.

Week 39, then: Hello Lamp Post finally released into the world, advertised to a city, and already surprising and delighting us. It’s a privilege to have the opportunity to make such work, and – as I often say – to make the world a little more weird.

Week 38: two weeks to go before Playable City launches.

The telephony code is roughly where I want it to be, which is good; there’s a big content influx going on in the run up to launch, and any tweaks to the logic will come in response to what it feels like with the final language in place.

The main focus of this week’s work was the public website: shelling out the basic back-end structure, and focusing on two live visualisations that are probably the most technically complex part of it.

The public site is entirely separate to the telephony application: that way any popularity on the public internet won’t affect the gameplay experience. So to represent any kind of data on the public site, we need to build some data-emitting endpoints on the telephony application. Once those were in place, spitting out sanely formatted JSON, I could start prototyping the visualisation around that data format.

The visualisations began as single HTML pages, using static inline JSON to seed them. Once I’d built up the representation of that code, moving to D3‘s d3.json method to suck the data over the network was not so hard – but it’s important to break these problems down in the right order, and the most important problem in this case was: given some JSON, how do we build both animation and interaction around it?

(As a side note: despite the evented complexity of what’s going on, I’m reminded again of how much I enjoy working in D3; one of my favourite New Things I Learned This Year and well worth your time if you’ve not encountered it: it’s useful for all manner of things).

By the end of the week, we had made a good amount of progress: the beginnings of a public site, the IA and design nearly complete, the beginnings of a back end, and importantly, the complex viz largely prototyped (meaning all that was left would be to incoprorate the actual designs/markup).

Almost nothing other than Playable City this week, as things should be: the only other things of note were a few discussions about workshops in July/August, and components for Sore slowly arriving.

Two main focuses this week: Playable City, which moves ever-closer to launch, and Sore, which is in early development stages.

The majority of Playable City work focused on two completely new kind of object. Most objects behave in the same way, and follow the same rules. However, we wanted to add some objects that behaved totally differently. One type has something that resembles a “dialogue tree” in it, with a degree of branching; the other is how objects advertising the game – posters, banners, and the objects they’re attached to – behave.

The latter was a variant of what we already have, and not too complex to rig up; the former was more complex. Once Sam had worked up some example flowcharts of what he thought such dialogue should feel like, I implemented them as simple command-line sketches, printing and receiving input from STDIO. That helped me debug my logic around how I was choosing what piece of content to show next – and meant that once I’d solved the logic, I could port it into the stateful, database-driven Playable City code without also having to decide how it worked.

I also began thoroughly documenting the processes and logic involved to make them visible to the rest of the team, and to aid decision making. That’s also going to be useful as we try to put together a “burndown” – a canonical list of everything left to do.

Sore is still very much in development, but a long meeting on Thursday hashed out what it might be better, derisking some parts of it, adding a few new features, and over the weekend I spent a little time pulling together two prototypes: one, of the software that will drive out; the other, of a book it can produce. It’s an unusual project: a creative collaboration, but very much whatever I want it to be, so pushing it to some unusual places. In this case, into materials that are going to be interesting to work with: equal parts software, hardware, and print.

Just a quick note to highlight the interview with Keith Stuart over at the Guardian Gamesblog that Ben and I conducted about Hello Lamppost.

We’ve spoken about it loosely to a lot of people, and there’s been a lot of high-level press doing the rounds – excitingly – but it was great to be able to go into a bit more depth about our influences and approach, and how the Playable City relates (or not) to the Smart City. It was also great to be able to cite the peers and friends that have influenced the project more explicitly.

You can read it at the Guardian Gamesblog.

I spent a day in Sheffield this week, for a short piece of design consultancy with Rattle. A really good workshop: some suitably curvy thinking, good sketching, and the result was a somewhat curious piece of media invention: inventing a media format for data visualisation.

A second day in the studio wrote this up with sketches, notes, and animatics. I think it’s gone in an interesting direction, though it’ll be interesting to see how it develops once it’s in the hands of makers: that’s where the meat of this work will be.

On Hello Lamppost – Muncaster – this week, the big news was the launch of the trailer. That’s had a great response, from both friends and the media. My colleagues at PAN sure do know how to make charming, informative short films.

Lots of meaty work on Hello Lamppost, too: defining and designing the final types of interaction, and also working out what we need the website to do. The coming weeks are going to be very busy on that front, burning down to launch, but we’ve got a plan in place: it should turn out well. Ben’s written a great update about everything we’ve been doing over at the Pan blog.

And finally, some communication work – pitching, discussing, scoping – about a project called Sore; bringing the likelihood of it happening closer to the event horizon.

Onwards!

Hello Lamppost launches in just under a month. This is the trailer we shot in Bristol a few weeks ago for the project.

Another bitty, fragmented week, in which the realities of life intruded on the realities of work.

Still, the positives that emerged this week were good: completing the work on last year’s tax return, for instance, alongside various moments of prodding, poking, and tinkering with various software projects. Lots of comms management, too: setting up a workshop day for Week 36, fixing some issues with Concert Club and Playable City, and prototyping a new feature for the latter.

I also took the time to catch up with friends passing through London for EToo, which helped me think a little harder about a personal games project for later in the year.

On Friday morning, I met up with Michael, who I’m mentoring through Northern Media‘s CreateInnovate programme. Over the next four months, we’re going to have regular catchups about the transmedia strategy for a feature film he’s producing. (Translation: the online marketing and promotion plan.) I’m not a huge fan of “the t-word”, but it does feel somewhat appropriate in this case: the film he’s working on has some diegetic elements that would extend very nicely to the outside world. So we’re going to be spending some time thinking those through. Nice to think a bit about strategy and narrative, and we enjoyed bouncing thoughts of one another; I look forward to our future sessions.

As I type, I’m on the way back from a workshop in Sheffield – hence the late delivery of these. Still, the beginnings of a busy week – which I’ll write more about in seven days’ time.

A quiet week, but worth documenting nontheless (if only to remind me of the shape of the year).

The majority of making-work was focused on Playable City – primarily firming up some infrastructure, making a few things more robust, and poking at the forecast.io API to see if there was anything to be done with it.

Otherwise, lots of new business development: some research and a proposal for an art project in September, and a mentoring project I can hopefully write more about shortly.

And, the realities of business: finalising tax returns, talking to accountants; continuing maintenance on live projects.

It’s often on these quiet weeks that weeknotes feel more like a chore than a joy, but I’m holding onto them: they’re useful as a practice, to see the ebb and flow throughout the year. Some weeks are busy, and this one was bitty and quiet. But the main thing it reminds me is how busy things are going to get quite soon. Onwards.

A short week, thanks to a pleasant and much-needed sunny Bank Holiday Monday.

This week involved a bunch of travel. Tuesday was a day in Brighton to discuss a potential art commission, currently referred to as Sore. Lots of interesting thoughts and discussion, but I need to sit down and process it offline a bit. So that’s going to be a focus of early Week 34.

Thursday was a trip to Bristol for the next tests and demonstrations of Hello Lamppost, our Playable City commission.

A secret: I find playtesting painful.

It’s a similar pain – but not identical – to user-testing. If you’ve ever stood on the dark side of a two-way mirror, and watched someone stab with a mouse at a product you’ve designed, failing to achieve a task you were sure was straightforward… you’ll have a glimpse of that pain.

But the element of testing games that I find uniquely painful is what we’re testing for. I’ve watched users fail to complete tasks, which was annoying, because we were designing for utility, for functionality: helping people achieve goals swiftly and simply.

When I test a game, I’m testing to see if it’s fun. Well, and many other things: is it balanced? Is there a skill curve? Would you come back to it? How do experienced and new players work together?

At the bottom of that, though, is a summation of all those questions: is it fun? Did it entertain?

Watching somebody explicitly not have fun with something that’s only purpose is (in one way or another) to entertain – well, that’s more awkward than any transactional website test I’ve done.

So for the duration of playtests, I’m pretty on edge.

First tests are always particularly tough – they should be; they indicate what’s going to need work. I’d be worried if they weren’t. And our first test, a few weeks ago, showed up lots of edges and holes.

Thursday was our second playtest in Bristol, and it was a notable improvement on the first – and satisfying and insightful in its own right. Lots of the rough edges from the first test were sanded away; the new elements of charm were all picked up on; and whilst it may have failed or had obvious holes, they didn’t seem to have the disarming effect of the first test, where players would be jolted out of the experience quite hard.

Also, the 12-year-olds we tested it with definitely enjoyed it, which was a really positive sign. (As was the enthusiasm of the project sponsors, who saw it later that night).

A good day, then: all the work of the previous week, and of some of this, paid off, and we’ve got a much clearer sight of the critical path for the final month. And, slowly, I began to get over my hatred of how playtesting makes me feel.

The week ended with a bit of maintenance work on Concert Club, filing down some rough edges and fixing some bugs that our early users have caught.

Much of this week was spent refactoring Muncaster – the Playable City codebase.

It’s the kind of code that gets fiddly to work with quickly. In making a conversational interface, you quickly move away from the kind of architecture that’s very simple to model in Object-Oriented languages and frameworks, and into something that’s much more about flow and state. As such, there’s lots of flow control and logic.

The catch here is that, in the Playable City design, there’s very little complexity to the “state” end of things, and very little happens on state-transition; instead, most of the weight of the work comes down to the flow control: what to say next, given what we know.

It’s been very easy to get into a “mazy of twisty passages, all alike“, especially as we try to adapt and modify the code based on playtests; there are so many dependencies that you end up walking through the control flow yourself as you code it a lot.

So my goal this week was to build something more final to build upon, tearing out things that didn’t work, and removing as many if statements as possible.

By the end of the week, a large amount of conditional logic had been torn out, and replaced with many, many tiny POROs, all responsible for building up fragments of a conversation, and none of which know anything about state other than the conversation they’re given to work with as input. In some ways, it’s not much simpler, but it’s proving much easier to modify, tweak, and extend, and that feels like it’s been really worth it. Logic has been torn out of the ActiveRecord models, and also become far less dependent on the database, which feels like an architectural win – and should make delivering Week 33’s playtest easier.

On Tuesday, I took part in a collaborative experience design workshop, run by Experientia. I said “yes” to this in part to see what that process was like from the other side of the table, and watch another design firm at work. It was super-rewarding on that front, and gave me some useful thoughts about future practice; also, I got to make lots of drawings with felt pens, which possibly bemused the other participants, but was a great work-out for my design brain.

And, of course, the other big news of the week was that Caper launched Concert Club. This is Detling: the project I’ve been talking about for the past couple of months. I’m really glad to see it in the world, even for its limited prototype lifespan: there are some interesting lessons to learn from it, and it’s been a lovely build process. I wrote more about it in this longer post last week, and I’d encourage you to find our more if you haven’t already.

Week 32 was a lot of code, then, and the usual last-minute wranglings to get a project live, but lots of nice pay-offs. In Week 33, we’ll get to put that code to use.

Today, I’m excited to announce the launch of Concert Club – a prototype previously referred to on this site as Detling.

Concert Club is a prototype site I built with Caper, in a project funded by the Technology Strategy Board and supported by BBC Radio 3.

The brief we responded to was to ‘bring the live music experience home‘ for listeners who couldn’t attend concerts. For us, the live experience of classical music is something experienced in quiet reflection: it’s complex, and demands a lot of your brain. It’s not like sport; you don’t tweet halfway through a Mahler symphony about how great the wind are.

But it’s still a very social experience: planning what to see, inviting friends, discussing it afterwards. So how could we share that feeling?

We’ve come to explain Concert Club as book groups for classical music. The book group is a great model: a way of friends engaging with culture they otherwise might not; taking it in turns to take the lead about where the group will go next; discussing a complex work after the fact. It feels like what many people do after a concert, too – and so Concert Club provides a tool to facilitate that model for live classical music concerts on Radio 3.

First, it provides a window onto Radio 3’s upcoming Live In Concert listings, letting you see concerts that are on iPlayer or coming shortly. You can invite friends to listen through the site – and once you’ve created a listening group (or accepted an invite) you’ll be reminded when the concert comes onto iPlayer, and just before it leaves. And once you’re listening, you can share that fact with the world on Twitter.

We haven’t built any discussion facility, quite deliberately – maybe you’ll want to talk about the concert on Facebook; maybe you’ll want to talk about it at someone’s house over a cup of tea, or in the pub. That facility already exists, so why rebuild it? But then, when you want to schedule something to listen to, or discover new music: Concert Club is there.

And if classical music is all a bit daunting, the site also features editorial guides that provide thematics ways in to the Live In Concert catalogue. We’re really keen that these reflect a somewhat different tone to the Radio 3 website, bridging classical music to culture listeners might already be more familiar with. And because the concerts available are always shifting, so are the “relevant concerts” linked from these guides.

It’s an early prototype built swiftly, but it has a first pass at a “complete loop” of interaction: discovery, invitation, listening, sharing. It’s live for two months, for now, and it’s going to be interesting to see how people use it. Even in this state, it’s already got all of us in the team listening to concerts far more.

And it was a pleasure to work on: Caper built a great team (hat tips to Dean, Audrey, and Tim, along with Rachel and Sophie from Caper) and in a tight build cycle I think we built something somewhat unusual, a little provocative, and with real scope to grow.

It’s live for a few months, and we’re interested in feedback from real users. It’ll be interesting to see what grows from it.

http://concertclub.wearecaper.com

Monday and Tuesday were spent in Bristol at the Pervasive Media Studio, running our first playtests of Hello Lamppost. Lots of useful feedback, lots of things to patch up and fix, and excellent support from the extended team at PMS.

The middle of the week saw the final demonstration of Detling to the BBC. That should be launching in a few days – and I’ll share more details of it then. It was a good demo, but also exciting to consider what the prospects beyond the early alpha will be.

There was a short piece of work towards the end of the week – Wilton – with After The Flood. I’ve known Max for a while, but it was good to work with him, even on a tiny engagement. A short period of sketching, thinking, and producing some illustrations of interfaces around data.

And then at the end of the week, I took the talk about data from last week at Telefonica, and showed it to a few people at Decoded. I think it went down well.

Lots of thinking and fixing on Hello Lamppost – and by the end of the week, a plan of attack to build what we hope will be the final platform for it. That’s for week 32, though.

Back to Playable City – Muncaster – this week. I spend a few days with Sam at Pan, really honing down the conversation mechanic and making sure the design supports everything we hoped it would. And then, for the second half of that work, focusing on getting a working implementation for playtests next week.

Conversation-systems – as I have learned many a time, most notably in Havasu – inevitably turn out to be messy tangles of procedural code, so it’s worth working hard to keep the codebase as sane as I can. That tends to involve drawing lots of flowcharts, documenting not only the expected routes through the system, but also the way the software implements those – which for various reasons isn’t always the same. It’s a good, visual way to make sure I don’t get lost in a maze of my own making.

On Wednesday, I went to Telefonica Digital to give a short talk about data visualisation at an internal hackday. That was a good excuse to do some new thinking, and I’m pleased with the new talk that emerged; some useful ideas to continue to think on, and which will no doubt feed into future talks. Thanks to Paul for the invite.

I also spent an afternoon working one final feature into Detling that we all agreed needed to be slotted in; it really closes the loop of the alpha, and makes the potential of the product much more obvious. Nice to drop it in at the last minute with relative ease. We’re showing the project to the BBC next week.

And finally, this week’s freelancer top tip: GOV.UK has ICS files for bank holidays. Thanks to subscribing to that a while back, I remembered to take Monday off. Ice cream and the smell of the sea are a very restorative way to kick the week off.

With Detling wrapped, something that was loosely meant to be a week off.

Not a holiday per se, but no client work. I think, in the end, I took about half the week off, and the rest rightly falls into Phil’s definition of work – nothing for a particular client, but definitely work on my own professional output.

I spent a little longer futzing with electronics, and mainly running into some horrid issues with bitwise maths that just weren’t entertaining enough for what was meant to be a relaxing week of research – so I put them to one side.

Instead, I spent much of Monday exploring the viability of a particular approach to a project (which is currently called Swinside). In this case, that was the integration of MIDI control surfaces, Ableton Live, Quartz Composer, and using webservices to generate text to be rendered by Quartz. (It’s a fun, if bizarre, toolchain to work with).

By the end of the day, I had an ugly demo up and running – practically a screensaver – but it was a real blue triangle moment for me, and super-satisfying as such.

“Blue triangle moment“ refers to a story I can no longer find the Gamasutra link for, so consider it apocraphyal: early Playstation devs, working on getting code running on their new devkits. They slaved over lots of things for a while, and at the end of their labour… a solitary blue triangle was rendered on screen. They cheered. Their project manager was less than enthusiastic – all that time just to make a single triangle appear? No, they explained, it’s not just a triangle. It’s a triangle that an artist drew in his 3D program, saved to disk, and we just imported the artist’s work, told it where to appear, hit build, and got an executable game. The blue triangle may be underwhelming, but it was proof the pipeline worked. Within another week, they had textured, animated, 3D characters appearing on the PSX. The hard work was proving the interconnection in a functional system – not rendering the triangle alone. The triangle meant much more than itself.

What I’ve learned is: yes, the bits I’m thinking about joining together would join together. An interesting feasibility study.

Otherwise, I spent the week in a variety of work-related meetings. Most were interesting early-stage conversations and some hypotheticals, although a very short piece of work – Wilton – has emerged, with After The Flood in a few weeks’ time. That should be interesting.

And, finally, I appear to have got myself an accountant. Freeagent has got my quite far, but I’m going to take an expert’s advice when it comes to tax returns.

Update: Tom Stuart rightly corrects me – it’s a black triangle, not a blue one.

Week 28: the final week of Detling.

And, I’m pleased to report, not too much of a scramble to the finish line. Instead: a carefully measured burndown, ticking things off the issue list as the team hummed along nicely. It was great to get a day with Dean in the studio, fixing all his snags with my design implementation, and adding a little polish where appropriate. It was also lovely to have another designer passing over a lot of the interactions whilst I finished up implementation – and, it goes without saying, it’s just great being in a room with him. We had a lot of fun.

The team converged nicely for the last two days, and we also fitted in a lot of copy overhaul as well as handover to Caper’s technical director, James; an hour took him through a complete tour of the site, and we had it up and running on his own machine as swiftly as anyone could hope for.

A satisfying end to a tight project, then. We all could see the next steps – the obvious jumping-off points, the rough seams in it – but they’re going to have to wait. For now, we need to put it in front of some real users, and see how they react. Pleasingly, that means it’ll be live in the real world, and I should be able to point to it shortly.

I spent a couple of days this week on the Playable City work with PAN. This was both game design work and some code refactoring: a fairly hefty refactor, but it left the codebase in a much better place for the design’s desires and ambitions, and should be easier to build on. Glad to have that out of the way. Aanand was a big help a few weeks ago in talking some sense into me.

On Friday, I spent the day poking around with my FRDM KL25Z: a prototyping board for the mbed platform. It’s a small prototyping board, about £8, and more powerful than an Arduino (though a tad less friendy to use). On-board, it has a lot of pin-outs, as well as an accelerometer, an RGB LED, and a capacitive touch strip.

I soldered up headers onto both boards, and started poking the mbed environment. One of the projects I’m investigating with it – a MIDI-driven readout – is still going to be harder than I planned, mainly owing to the programming side – but otherwise, got them up and running swiftly. Interesting to diversify into new microcontrollers, and useful learning for the summer. I shall continue to poke it in due course.

A good week. By the end, the combination of project conclusions and some strong antibiotics meant I was pretty wiped. Over the next few weeks, I’m primarily focusing on an equal split of Playable City, along with some of my own work, which will lead to some new things to share here, I hope.

Another head-down week.

It might seem it’s not so useful to write about the head-down weeks, where I’m chipping away at design or code. I think it’s still worth writing these notes: they’re a useful way of me reflecting on progress, on what could be improved, and a good way to focus back on exactly what happened in the past seven days. It’s rarely as simple as ‘did more X‘; rather, it’s useful to measure the pace of the work.

This was the final full week on Detling, and a lot of my focus was on some final pieces of functionality and bringing it into land. That meant finishing up the design work, as well as beginning to make sure the distributed team were all up to speed on everything that was going on. By the end of the week, several strands of work – production, editorial, testing, design, development – were all motoring forwards in parallel, and it was great to see everything sync up.

I also implemented simple image uploads for some editorial functionality. Heroku, having a read-only filesystem, doesn’t let you upload data through webforms to its servers; you need to store uploads somewhere else, such as S3. However, I continued the theme of gluing services together (as mentioned last week) and set up Cloudinary. Again, a lovely, seamless process: dropping in the gem, plus Carrierwave, and image uploads (along with offline processing/resizing) were integrated. It’s great to see such common modules of functionality extracted to services – and to be implemented so well.

Otherwise, I spent a lot of the week bouncing between vim and the Github issues list – marking things off, leaving notes for myself, and assigning away where appropriate. The pile went down faster than it went up, and I think all’s in a great place for the final few days of code and testing. I’m looking forward to be able to share the work soon.

A couple of brief – but interesting – meetings, one about a talk, another about music and technology, broke up the week. That was 27.