A very busy week. Longridge is clearly in the home stretch, owing to the small number of minor tweaks and bits of polish that needed applying. Hopefully I’ll have more to say on that soon.

Over on Willsneck, I ported the site to be built and managed with Hugo. Whilst the static prototype isn’t quite complete - there’s one major page that still needs designing - there was enough in place to start. It helped that the structure of my Parcel-based prototype was highly similar to how I’d go about building the site in Hugo. So I bit the bullet and dived in.

This all went quite smoothly. I took the opportunity to port some pieces of content that I was generating from JSON files to using headless page bundles, meaning adding new content objects is as easy as adding new markdown files.

Once the templates ported over, the rest of the process was very smooth. CSS was still being processed with PostCSS, so I could just drop all the SCSS over. JS, for now, is just being loaded as-is. And fixing up deployment was as straightforward as changing a few lines in our Github Action workflow. The fundamental model - download some dependencies, build a static site, force a commit of that static site to the appropriate branch - is exactly the same. The only thing that’s changed is what the dependencies are, and how to build the site. I was pleased that the previous week’s decision had paid off so neatly.

On Wednesday, some fabricated prototypes for an electronics idea I’m working on arrived. The fabrication quality was excellent, and definitely worth investing in for this project. I rigged up a USB-C port on the board, and started on writing firmware. A few hours on Wednesday got me to a point where we had a bootloader on the board, code flashing over USB-C, USB MIDI working, and a microcontroller writing and reading data from a small flash RAM module. There’s still a way to go, and there’s definitely bugs on the board - I had to remove a few pre-soldered components and bodge one jumper wire before we could bring anything up, and that took an hour to work out - but progress was largely encouraging. I’m probably going to spend a few hours each week working this up.

And then, at the end of the week, I spent three days teaching with Hyper Island again, acting as industry lead for the “Digital Technologies” module of their MA in Digital Management. As ever, it was an intense, exciting opening few days: several talks from me, some excellent guest speakers, a workshop, and then coaching the teams on their work for this module. I’ll be returning in January for another intensive weekend to wrap up my teaching on that module.

That was a lot. It’s going to be a little quieter in the final two weeks up to Christmas, but it’s still a fairly full slate to the end of the year.

I submitted the last of the content for Longridge this week. That means that project is now into review, and should be going live next month. It’s been a bit longer to get here than planned, but I’m very pleased with the results.

I started getting into the meat of Willsneck. That mainly involved more old-fashioned front-end code: HTML, CSS, and the lightest sprinkling of Javascript where appropriate. I also spent some time applying CSS keyframe animation to SVGs, which led to results swiftly.

And I kicked off building out the deployment infrastructure. I always like to get deployment up and running early: it’s one less thing to worry about later in the project. In this case, I’m doing things a little differently. We’re deploying the site to Github Pages, and using the just out-of-beta Github Actions as a continuous integration to do so.

I really like this setup. It’s similar to the way tools like Netlify work, but with a little more control in exchange for a little more complexity. Rather than being reliant on the few static-site builders that Github Pages allows you to use, we’re using Actions as our builder. That means on every push to our master branch, an Action runs on a virtual machine. That Action checks out our code, installs dependencies (and caches them for future runs), and builds the site to a dist/ directory. And then it commits the contents of that directory back to our gh-pages branch.

That means we get continuous deployment of a static site on every push to master, but without having to store the compiled artefacts in the repository. Which is exactly as it should be: the repository contains the source for the site, not the compiled code as well; it’s generated as necessary. This setup is working well with my temporary Parcel-based site, and it’ll be straightforward to move to using Hugo for the final site.

I’m impressed with Github Actions, and will consider it more for future tooling - the ability to run actions on a schedule means that many of the sites I’ve not moved to simpler builds or platform largely because of a lack of cron on them… might now be possible to move to a static site, and a few scripts running on GitHub.

Finally, I took a quick look at the code for Hallin and got it spun up on my own machine - good enough going to be able to schedule a first meeting for that project.

A good week: lots of code, nice to be back in a client office again, and one project nearly on the runway.

Longridge is properly coming into land now. That’s meant almost all my work on it has been dealing with feedback: minor edits, checking the content on the platform itself, final feedback on videos. There’s a big deadline next week, and there’s about the right amount of things left in the right state, which is about the best you can ask for. It helps that, having taken a while to come together, I’m pretty pleased with the content we settled on, and how it’s come out. I’m hoping the peer review process will go smoothly.

Willsneck kicked off on Thursday: a short website build gig. I’d already been briefed by the team, and so hit the ground running, working on building up basic infrastructure for developing the site, and the first pass of the flat pages. Working in the browser in 2019 is really rather satisfying compared to twelve years ago: the promise of web standards is finally truly paying off, and Grid and Flexbox make life a lot easier.

One of the new things I’ve decided to learn on this project is Parcel, which I’m using as a bundler/build tool for writing the flat pages. Normally, the minimum I need is compiling SCSS (which I like for tidiness), so that means integrating with PostCSS for compilation. This time, I’m also using posthtml for processing my static markup. posthtml is doing two things for me. By using posthtml-include, I can use very, very simple templating - just including one HTML file in another. But that’s enough to handle repetitive elements like headers and footers, before I port the whole static build to a content management system. I’ve also found that posthtml-expressions will let me include data and simple JS expressions in my templates. That’s particularly handy for some pages that are going to be driven from JSON-based data - I can prototype with the real data before we even get near the CMS. Always useful to add new tools to the belt, and I’ve found these libraries combined with Parcel to be the Right Level of Simple for the job at hand. Willsneck continues next week, as I get into the thornier detail work around art direction, SVGs, and CSS animation.

Hallin, the other small software development job that’s on the table, edges closer to likelihood. I spent an hour or two going over the existing code and writing enough documentation for myself to be able to spin up the project from a bare checkout. That was… neither as easy as I’d like, nor anywhere near the hardest spin-up I’ve had to do. But it’s useful for getting a feel for what adding functionality to someone else’s long running codebase will feel like, and useful feedback to the potential client.

Finally, for an entirely separate personal project, I ordered an electronics prototype from JLCPCB. I’ve used JLC a few times for prototype boards. This time around, I’m also taking advantage of their prototyping service to build up the boards (or, at least, about 75% of them, the remaining components being things they don’t have, or that I can source cheaper). Exciting to see how those will come out. This is also the first board I’ve designed in KiCad. This article and the scripts in it were highly useful for generating a positioning file.

Looking at those notes reinforces what I already was feeling in my bones: it’s going to be a busy end to the year.

Very busy right now, so I’ll break a habit and do weeknotes as bullet points:

• Longridge is going well. Lots more review work, getting a second course to 1.0, filling in some blanks, re-recording and re-editing fragments of screencasts, and getting a first draft of the third (and final) course done. That course introduces UX design through the lens of designing a small mobile app. It begins with a look at the materiality of the modern smartphone (although not, for my target learners, using quite that language), before going through to a first look at user journeys, paper prototyping, clickable mockups, and what design teams look like. Phew. Nearly there on the content delivery.
• It looks like another short technical project, Willsneck, will slot in in the run up to Christmas, kicking off next week.
• …and had a phonecall about another short piece of software development for a little further into the future. That still feels like it’s about 40% likely, but it was a good call, so we’ll see what happens there.

Wearing a lot of hats right now, and doing a lot of different kinds of work. As such, there’s not a huge amount of time for reflection, right now: the goal is delivery. That means keeping the foot - gently - on the gas pedal for a bit.

Another week of writing, editing, and typing.

I finished a first draft of the first half of the third (and last) course I’m writing. This one is an introduction to design and UX, through the lens of prototyping a simple mobile app.

Explaining “design” from a standing start, in a limited space of time, is… challenging to say the least. If I had thousands words and many weeks it feels like it’d at least be easier - but I have hundreds of words, and two weeks of content. So the course is more of a whistle-stop tour, and I’m agonising over each paragraph, keeping them on point without introducing more questions than they answer.

I spent a good chunk of time reviewing all of course 2, which - despite the picky detail that Track Changes likes to ask you to approve - was a relatively smooth process. I’d definitely learned a bit from writing course 1. About the single most challenging set of edits were having to come up with meaningful “wrong” answers for multiple choice quizzes, each with accompanying explanation. I’m no fan of multiple choice, but it’s a format I’ve been given, so I’m just working with what I’ve got.

I also recorded two screencasts for course 2, in which I walk through my own solutions to the exercises. Although they’re meant to sound ‘off-the-cuff’, and involve me narrating as I type, I still require a degree of scripting. A short list of key points in front of me gives me marks to hit: just enough reminders of what’s coming next that I don’t ramble or waffle, and we keep the length down. A quick edit job on each and they were good to send to the video team.

I also did a bit more wrangling for December’s Hyper Island teaching. That meant finalising some timetables, and meeting up with our client for the students’ brief. Fortunately, things are firming up: the variables in the timetable are turning into constants, which makes everything a lot more straightforward.

These are a bit late, so let’s keep them quick.

On Longridge I wrapped up the draft of the HTML/CSS course I started in Week 356.

I’d written all the content already; all that was left was the two practical exercises, where the learner first marks up a webpage, and then adds CSS in step two to bring it to life. These took a little ‘rehearsal’, making sure the instructions lined up with the results, and adding as much clarity as possible to the instructions.

In the end, I framed them a little like a puzzle. I made sure included each exercise included a bit of boilerplate code that learners might be able to use to help them with solutions to their own exercises. After all, problem-solving on the front-end often comes down to a combination of your own knowledge and a looking at what you’ve already got.

I also rehearsed my own screencast walkthrough of one of the exercises, and discovered that I’d have to script the key points I needed to hit, or else it’d get rambly fast. I’m planning to record those at the end of week 358.

I did a little planning for this winter’s Hyper Island teaching on their part-time Digital Management MA. The structure of this year’s days is coming together, but there are still has some gaps in the schedule, which we had a phone call to try to fill in.

I also got a little while to spend on Dent. I built the board up and, other than one missing trace, this time, it worked correctly! I managed, after some wrangling, to get the UF2 bootloader onto it, and then get some test firmware on. I’d say the work was about 75% successful: all the UI elements are working correctly, and I’m reading the SD card over SPI fine. But the DAC audio out is proving troublesome, so when I get another moment, I guess there’s more debugging to be done.

And that was it. Mainly: typing, thinking.

Another week of writing: this time, writing a course on HTML and CSS for total beginners. This is slightly more practical than last week’s: more about doing than thinking.

But gosh, it’s hard. It’s a very short course, and so we’re going at a lick to cover a reasonable tour of the environment. Very quickly, we get into jargon and complexity, despite my best attempts to avoid it. One reason for this is my avowal to avoid jargon when I can, but to never tell you things that aren’t correct. So when I have to introduce a thing as a declaration or property or selector… I do exactly that.

Fortunately, the browser, and markup, are forgiving environments: they do their best to render whatever you throw at them, regardless of mistakes (and in part for long historic reasons). And we’re doing everything in the browser, without having to install software - CodePen makes for a great beginner IDE.

I’m also relying a little on asking the learner to trust me in the course of a short article. I hope that’s justified. What I’m really asking them is: “if things have briefly stopped making sense, can you trust me for a little? I promise to bring things into land in a little while - but we might have to briefly leave the ground.” Or, in plain English: I can give you clarity paragraph-to-paragraph, but not always sentence-to-sentence. Perhaps that’s a weakness in my writing style.

Still, having just written a course about more imperative styles of code, it’s nice to look at languages where I can show a learner the majority of the syntax in a few hundred words - and where the complexity is located in the implementation detail.

Of course, there are still cans of worms that I’m finding and then having to write my way out of. Writing about CSS, I was talking about styling rules overriding one another, and used this as an example:

p.intro {
  color: #ff0000;
}

I am most familiar with writing CSS colors in the format #RRGGBB, where RR, GG, and BB are two-digit hexadecimal numbers; it’s also what I’ve seen used most in the world.

And yet this adds extra complexity for the absolute beginner. I have a limited word count, and do I all of a sudden want to lose 100 words to explaining hexadecimal numbers? Not really. So I replaced it with this, for the time being:

p.intro {
  color: red;
}

which lets us focus on the real idea I wanted to write about (namely, how p.intro overrides and extends p).

---

In some down hours, I spent some time wrapping my head around KiCad. All my electronics work to date has been done with EAGLE. I’ve spent long enough with that piece of software that I’ve developed a kind of Stockholm Syndrome for it, despite its unintuitive nature (along with a large parts library). But a particular open-source project I’m working on is not ideally suited to EAGLE, especially if other people are to work on it, and I feel that future versions of it may be better supported in an open-source tool. Hence investigating KiCad.

I’ve never really got my head around KiCad before. Partly that’s time; partly that’s it behaving much more like most schematic capture/EDA tools (where you do one, then the other), unlike EAGLE’s merging of the two functions. It required a shifting of my mental model.

What helped me overcome this hurdle was Chris Gemmell’s Getting to Blinky 5.0, and I wanted to write about that quickly because it’s helped me thinking about teaching new topics.

Getting To Blinky teaches KiCad by going through the whole process of making a circuit board. It’s a simple circuit: a timer that flashes an LED, with a coin cell battery. The course takes the viewer through making a schematic symbol, drawing up a schematic, annotating it and matching it to footprints, making a new footprint where one is missing, laying out a board, and getting their board fabricated.

What I like about the course that it covers “one of everything”: at the end of it, you have done each major task that you’ll ever need to do exactly once. You can then adapt what you’ve learned to your own work. I found it particularly helpful coming from another tool as, at each stage, I was mapping what Chris showed me to what I knew. I like the focus on end-to-end, with a simple (eight component) board - and in particular, teaching making symbols/footprints early on.

I am not sure what it’s like for the total beginner - it goes quite fast, for sure (although the pause and rewind buttons are underrated features of video content). But for me, it gave me exactly enough of the tour that with a little bit of time each day across the week, I had designed a development board for a potential project from to-to-bottom in it:

Also, it has a surprisingly good 3D layout preview and raytracer in it.

This project is to be filed away for November, but it was nice to pick up a new tool, and thinking about how somebody else was teaching it helped me think about my own teaching.

Weeknotes this week are dry, I’m afraid. I am still writing Longridge. I’d hoped to move onto writing my second course, but spent much of the week wrangling feedback on the first.

On the flipside, the feedback was all useful, and easily sorted, by and large. It should also help to make the other two courses a bit faster to write, now I have a better idea of what’s expected. But it’s put me back a bit.

Mainly, I rewrote exercises, edited an interview, drew up some quizzes, recorded one more voiceover, and then two more chunky screencasts that had me deep in Hitfilm’s composite clip editor to tell the story correctly. Phew.

I did get some time on Tuesday afternoon to spend thinking about an exercise for the second course - actually taking the plan in my head and walking through it myself. The good news is that at least half of it should be reasonably straightforward; however, I’m going to have to solve the second half of the exercise in the course of writing next week. Still, it’s had me ruminating on the issues ahead, so that’s a good thing.

A week on Longridge.

I wrote an end-to-end draft of the first of the courses. Primarily, that was writing prose, but it’s more than just long articles: I’m writing a mix of informative essays, the odd quiz, and exercises for learners.

The exercises were versions of ones I’ve run before, but they prove particularly time-consuming - as well as writing them, I need to run them myself to check they work, and write scripts or articles to describe successful outcomes.

But they’re done, and now they’re being reviewed by other members of the team.

I also spent some time on my end of the videos for all three courses. That meant more assemblies of interviews to end the week, once the course content was shipped, and also submitting sample screencast videos recorded at home to see if they’d pass muster with the production team. It sounds like they will - so now I’ve just got to get on with the recording there.

My home screencast recording setup goes like this: I record screen and audio simultaneously. I use Quicktime Player to capture the screen, and record audio from my external microphone as I do - a Red5 condenser mic going into my audio interface. At the same time as recording the audio+video in Quicktime, I also set the audio recording in Logic Pro, where a simple channel strip is setup on a mono channel. When I finish the recording, I open the video and both audio tracks in a video editor, align the Quicktime audio with the processed audio, and then disable the Quicktime-recorded audio. That way, I get the captured video with the processed audio. It sounds and looks pretty good to my eyes and ears.

That made for a full week - not much time for much else. Next week, we move onto writing a full draft of course number two.

Back after a few weeks away, and straight to the studio. No time to build up the boards and stencils that arrived for Dent: instead, I went straight into writing and content review on Longridge.

I got my head down on writing content so the team could review my style and give me some pointers. I managed a first draft of about a third of one course; I need to wrap up the rest by next Wednesday.

I also reviewed the interview films that had been shot whilst I was away. The team kindly provided transcripts and timestamped footage to go over, and I had to work out what should go into the final film. It’s hard to do this solely from a transcript - you end up finding that intonation is key, or that sometimes the way somebody’s said something just flows more naturally in a different take. So I sat down with the footage and Hitfilm and hammered out a couple of ‘assembly’ edits - nothing final, and they wouldn’t contain any of the cutaways or B-roll that the video team had for the final film - but enough to get a feel for if the final edit we were hoping for would flow. I know I could have just supplied a script or a cut-list, but it helped reassure me that what I hoped was possible would work.

In a spare moment, I fixed a firmware bug on 16n that had been nagging a lot of people for quite a while. No great breakthrough on my part; instead, a well-framed bug report suddenly made the issue very clear, and half an hour in an editor got the bug fixed. Now I’m just finding people to help me confirm there’s been no regression, and then I’ll try to package that up into a release in the coming weeks.

Out of the studio, on vacation. Back at the beginning of October!

Head down on production for Longridge. That meant a few phone meetings with the production team, finalising a few more participants, and lots more pre-interviews with video subjects.

That’s all done, now, and the video shoots will be taking place over the next couple of weeks.

I also spent some time preparing a few more scripts for non-interview films, and getting drafts of them out for review. One - just trying to describe in simple terms, the round-trip of a browser request - flummoxed me for a long time; it got lost in hundreds of words on DNS and ended up baggy, boring, and over-long.

A few days away from it and I found a different approach. I sat down and worked out what the point of this film was - what I wanted learners to come away from it with. I knew this in my head, but needed to emphasise it to myself, so it was time to write out the big ‘beats’.

Seeing them laid out gave me a slightly different direction on the same story, and allowed me to bring it in well within our time limit. Yes, it simplifies a few things, but it still tells the truth. The change is it now ‘spends’ its time on the key beats, and pulls focus on things that we don’t need to know about (yet). If you write for a living, you likely know this lesson innately; for me, it’s reminder of muscles I need to keep exercising.

Finally, before I head off for a vacation, I generated a “revision B” of the boards for Dent and ordered them - along with a plastic solder stencil. They should be with me when I return, and perhaps we’ll have more joy. I’ll be head-down writing Longridge then, but a project for spare moments.

Head down on Longridge this week.

I wrestled with a script for an animation early in the week, and just couldn’t get it to anywhere I was happy with. I clearly need to zoom back out a level, and reminder myself what work this video is doing. Then I can work out what I want to show in it. I have a feeling the trick is, for what I want it to convey, to say far less. There’s a follow-up piece of text that I can go into further detail if I want to.

Another four-minute script went a little better, so that’s in review now.

Otherwise, I’ve mainly been thinking about production tasks: finding interview subjects, performing pre-interviews, writing them up as quasi-scripts for the production crew.

I’m fortunate that I learned a bit about this during making Future Speak, where Kirsty - the excellent producer - ran a lot of these. “Pre-interviews” are where the interview subject gets phoned up ahead of the ‘real’ interview… and we discuss what we’re going to ask them. This does a few useful things. Firstly, it prepares them for the questions they’ll definitely get asked; for documentary-type work, there’s nothing to be gained by anyone being surprised. Secondly, it allows us to help the interviewee frame their responses in the way we’d like - we can tell them a bit about what our target audience might or might not know, or ask them to be prepared to explain particular things in more detail. Finally, it also allows us to be surprised. When somebody says something interesting or exciting - great! We can dive deeper and add it into our script. Or if an expert in a field offers a better way of framing something than I might have asked - let’s put that in, too.

I take notes in writing, but ask if I can record them, just in case I miss anything or want to return to them. Piezo proves invaluable in that regard. There are lots of ways of recording audio from apps - such as VOIP calls or hangouts - but I’ve found Piezo to be reliable and remarkably simple; no messing with routing, just click some buttons and hit record. Really useful to have.

Several interviewees all lined up and prepped, and a pile of short scripts drafted. Week 349 should see me sorting out the final interviews and submitting final scripts.

But with Dent benched for a little while, that was my week.

On the projects front:

• Longridge is getting off to a good start. I’m hunting down contributors, doing introductions, firing off emails. I’m also beginning to write some scripts just to get my hand in and to see if they line up with what the production crew are expecting. Not quite where I wanted to be by the end of Friday, but the team seem pleased where we are, and I had several good meetings with them during the week so I’ll take that and carry that momentum into next week.
• Dent is going back to the drawing board, but possibly not for a month or so, given Longridge combined with impending holiday. It turns out the current build just won’t behave; I spent some time with a J-Link really prodding at the thing and no amount of work in gdb would solve my problems. So we’ll start again in October.

I spent a little time getting myself quickly up-to-speed with some new technologies this week - always good to keep my hand in, and at least one of them was an audition for Longridge:

• I finally wrapped my head properly, clearly around CSS Grid; gosh, what a breath of fresh air. It makes two-dimensional grid layouts just a breeze to write. I also managed to understand its relationship with (and differences to) flexbox. After a long period of reading docs, I now had understanding in my hands. Good.
• To that end, I managed to tear out all of Bootstrap from this site - which had used it for positioning. Replaced the lot with CSS Grid and Flexbox in under an hour. Very happy with that - and also happy that the trade-offs for users of older browsers are, to my mind, totally acceptable.
• I continue to poke and prod at Javascript frameworks, and spent an evening (off-duty) kicking the tyres on Svelte. I’m interested in Svelte for how it approaches the reactive-UI pattern, but also how it removes the load on the client by just… being a compiler. Given the Javascript community’s fondness for (or, perhaps, reliance on) transpilation, going the whole hog doesn’t seem that much of a difference. I quickly ported my personal ‘hello world’ of reactive UIs to it, and enjoyed the process, the clarity, and the light page load. I’m still not sure how I feel about the ‘magical’ binding and slightly higher need for simple stores; I found myself using stores and subcription in places React would force me to explicitly pass functions and state down, endlessly, which to my mind is both good and bad., Still, I like its approach to reactivity and its single-file component structures, and especially its approach to performance and webbishness.

And that was the technology I played with; not project-oriented, but useful for me in lots of ways, and worth sharing here, as a log of what I get up top.

A good week - but gosh, the next two are going to be busy.

Longridge is now fairly positioned on the launchpad.

The structure and broad content of the courses are now signed off; that means all that’s left is writing them (and making a number of films). I had a call about content creation for the project, and that means I’m going to be kicking off equal amounts of writing and production tasks next week. A little bit nervewracking, but we’ve got a plan and a list of things to burn down, and so the job now is to work through it and make sure everybody’s happy. I’m going to be making some spreadsheets to keep track of everything (or, maybe, some crazy walls)

I also kicked some tires on an exercise I was thinking about using on Longridge, and everything seemed to work as I hoped, so that’s a goer. One less thing to worry about.

Over on backburner projects, my prototype PCBs for Dent arrived early in the week, along with the stencils for soldering it up. So I spent Monday bringing the board up: getting the paste applied, getting components on the board, baking them on, and then looking to flash the firmware.

Which, not entirely unexpectedly, just didn’t work at all. Not a complete write-off - I can see the board over SWD, but no joy flashing it, and the main thing that happens when you power it up is that the microcontroller gets really hot. That’s… not the desired functionality.

I wondered if it was my solderpaste, so I built up a second board largely by hand, with only hot-air used for the QFN MCU, but no dice. I went back to the drawing board - EAGLE - and decided that I’d definitely been having some strange ideas about how the schematic should come together. I drew up a Revision B, from some better reference material, and perhaps I’ll send that off soon-ish and we’ll try again. I also spent a while double-checking everything I could about flashing Atmel SAMD51 chips, and learned a fair bit: I might well use a different toolchain next time around.

Anyhow, it’s probably worth another iteration, so that’s a thing to be going on with. It’s going to be a few weeks before new revisions will arrive, which is a good thing, as I’m going to be busy! A long weekend coming up; Week 347, we begin some typing in earnest.

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.

After an intense week 343, 344 was much quieter. I got some feedback on the work so far on Longridge, so spent another afternoon or so wrapping up my work there, going over that feedback, adding some new things, and sending it all off for approval.

A box of parts arrived for Dent. Not much happening there til the prototype boards arrive, however, so that’s sat on my desk.

In “learning things” time, I spent a little while exploring new deployment options for servers. In particular, I spent some time looking at Dokku, a containerised deployment platform that installs to a greenfield server environment and then allows deploys via git pushes. It uses Heroku-style ‘buildpacks’ to provision and configure server infrastructure. I’m not sure I’ll move to it just yet, but a small amount of work got me a setup that will compile Hugo sites upon deployment and then point nginx at the deployed folder. Useful to consider as a way of gardening future servers, and also of standardising deployments and tools for myself.

And at the weekend, I saw in this picture of Richie Hawtin playing live… that he’s got a 16n as part of his rig (spot the faders between the tangle of cables that is his modular synthesizer, and the little 303-clones by his waist):

I was pleased and proud of that.

A busy week: lots of work, not a huge amount to say, as a result.

I spent four days at After the flood on High Vinnalls. This was a product development and data exploration exercise. I worked on exploring some datasets for an ongoing client project over theirs, building tools to quickly spelunk around in the data and establish signal, noise, and see what other things would reveal themselves. Not in order to visualise them, necessarily, nor to make a data-exploration product. Rather, the exploration was to support product development and invention. What products might be possible? Does the data support various ambitions?

ATF presented to the client at the end of the week, so it was an intense few days of thinking, sketching, and coding. Really good to be in the room working closely with designers as we tried to understand the shape of what we’d been given to work with.

In amongst that, I went up to Leeds on Wednesday night to spend all day THursday on a workshop at the University for Longridge. The goal of the workshop was to devise the structure and outline of three short courses I’d been writing. This too was very, very intense; I think we made good progress, but I’ll need to return to what we did in week 344 to finish up a few last things - and to be able to look back on it with the benefits of some perspective!

I also got a goahead at the weekend for an initial exploration into Dent, which may, or may not, turn into a project in due course. For now, it’s a quick pass to just see if anything is possible. This is a small hardware project - very much something on the side, but a nice backburner project if it comes off.

Phew. Busy, busy week.

Longridge is really beginning to motor. I finished writing a the initial preparatory work for a workshop in Week 343. That was harder than planned. Lots of variables are still up in the air, and the later stages of the work are highly dependent on these ones; as a result, I sometimes get tangled trying to think about all the possible outcomes. But: I got enough done to generate the raw materials I was required to for the workshop, which was most important.

Also, the topic area is now well established around in my head, which means I have lots more thoughts still unwritten - some aren’t quite ready for that, others might emerge in the right context. I think that’s all fine: it’s the right place to be in at this point, and will be more things to feed in to the workshop next week.

Towards the end of the week, a short piece of work for After The Flood came in. I’m going to be spending the rest of Week 343 with them, working on some product exploration around data for them - coding, talking, thinking work. Looking forward to working with that team again.

I also have a small hardware project that has had some external encouragement to suggest it’s worth getting to the end of phase zero on it. Phase zero is, I suppose, the point where something reveals if it’s going to be A Thing or not. Sometimes, you do the work, and there’s just not a product there (or not one worth building); better to find that out with as little effort as possible. I’m going to finish up this exploration phase and see where it lands. For now, that means getting some PCBs spun and assembling them when they arrive.

My little React prototype is in good shape. Something clicked and I tore out lots of component-spaghetti. Now there are just enough components. All of a sudden, passing state down looks tidy, rather than baroque. I spent some time adding a few little features, and continuing to refine my knowledge of new browser APIs. It still feels like a delight to find so many browser APIs being generally supported - I come from an era where most of the Good Stuff just wans’t standard enough. And, on top of it: the little tool is beginning to feel usable.

And that’s about it. Week 343 is a busy one: in Leeds on Thursday for Longridge, and at ATF for the rest of the week.

I kicked off work on Longridge this week, with a remote meeting to go over the shape of the initial work, and some of the approach. That’s given me some grounding, some ideas for a deadline at the end of Week 342, and - most importantly - some homework before a workshop in week 343. That homework lead to some planning, research, and an afternoon of kicking tyres on the internet - amongst other things. I actually need to check what I can say about Longridge - I think I can be reasonably public - so I might describe that more next week.

I spent a day brushing up on the state of web development in 2019. I’m a lapsed front-end developer back from the days when that primarily involved deep knowledge of HTML and awful, awful browsers. (I definitely have built some IE6-compatible sites in my time). Since then, I’ve seen front-end change a lot, and done a nice pile of work on Captionhub with the HTML5 media extensions and spec. But there’s still new things to learn, so I spent an afternoon bringing myself up-to-speed with CSS Grid. Gosh, it’s good, isn’t it? It solves a problem elegantly, and still gives - in many situations - completely acceptable fallbacks when it’s not available. A really elegant API, and a nice bit of technology. I have a small backburner project that I’m using to learn new things on, and I spent some more time on that this week, too; it’s nearly hitting a nice alpha point, so perhaps a concerted day or two in the future will push that over the hill.

It’s nice catching up with technology once it’s a little established. I subscribed hugely to the notion of choosing boring technology. I’ve never been let down by boring technology, and, some days, it’s been reassuring to have my bacon saved by not picking something that goes out of fashion as fast as it came in, or doesn’t have support, or just ended up being the wrong horse. It’s why I still am entirely comfortable shipping Rails projects: it works, it’s expressive for developers, Performant Enough, and gets web-apps based around shipping content to/from databases over HTTP out the door quickly. Uncontroversial. So rather than hurtling to stay up-to-date with trends, I’m comfortable keeping one eye on them, and the other on the Unexciting Present. I’ll read, think, compare, but committing to using them is a very different process. Now that I’m in a lull, it’s time to catch up a little and explore.

I also shipped a few small pieces of code related to things I’ve been doing recently.

Firstly, some Javascript: wxr_to_json is a small command-line node tool for converting Wordpress eXtended Rss to JSON files, simply for ease of processing. It’s a little opinionated - it flattens some one-item arrays into objects - but it works very well for large WXR dumps; v8 and xml2js are very, very quick.

Secondly, some Ruby. I packaged up a gist by Stefan Daschek into a gem to use as a Capistrano plugin. It’s ideal for deploying static sites (including build processes) with cap: it makes a clean local checkout, gives you hooks to run build processes, and then uses rsync to move built content to a server (and lets you use all of cap’s versioned deployment tools). The code worked, but it felt cleaner to turn it into a gem, rather than a lib file floating around my repository. So I finished the bundling job and wrote a pile of documnetation. No idea if either of these will be useful to other people, but they’re easily shared. So let’s do that, then, and perhaps someone else will find them useful. (Why are you using a server and not a CDN for a stic site, you might ask? To avoid yakshaving, primarily. Change one thing at once!)

And that was a week.