Posts tagged as muncaster (page 2)

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.

A relatively unremarkable week. A day at PAN, working on Playable City and chatting with Ben and Sam – and the rest of the week spent working on Detling for Caper.

I finished hacking up a prototype for the Playable City chatbot, to expose a few things – how fast the feedback loop was; what SMS affords; what sort of language we need to stick to; how natural it feels to use. Something for Ben and Sam to play with whilst I’m wrapping up Detling. I got there, though there’s a big architectural shift I need to make as soon as possible – something I discovered through the making. (Namely, that my domain model wasn’t quite right. Good to catch this now. When I get back to the project, it’s the first thing on the list.

The Detling work was primarily infrastructural: setting up lots of outbound emails, shifting the sending of email onto a background queue.

This was not that hard at all – partly down to the maturity of the Rails ecosystem in 2013, and partly down to the maturity of service platforms. I’m using Sidekiq on top of Redis as my background queue, and it’s pretty much install-and-go. devise-async moves all the signup mailers onto that queue, and it didn’t take much work in the codebase to move the blocking mailers onto queued tasks. Sidekiq also gives us scheduled tasks for free – ideal for the reminders that the site is going to send out.

Then it was just a case of setting up outbound email. I’m using Postmark for this. I’m a big fan of their service: inbound and outbound email simplified down to POST requests. Best of all, they handle things like whitelisting, meaning I don’t have to worry about my outbound email being blocked. I’m happy to pay the small cost for that.

There’s still a skill to gluing these pieces together appropriately, but it’s the quality of libraries and services like these that let me focus on the domain-specific problems of the project, rather than reinventing the wheel; it lets us get a lot done for relatively little effort, and it’s this approach that’s helped Detling motor along.

Beyond the infrastructure, I spent the rest of the week focusing on unknown unknowns and new edges that were arising: simplifying URLs, refining the ingest process, beginning to integrate Dean’s design work, thinking about editorial content, and working with the team to really line up the burndown for next week – our final full week of build.

And that was it: no meetings, no strategy, just head down at the codeface.