Posts tagged as poem1

  • Worknotes: Winter 2024

    23 January 2025

    I was working up to the wire in 2024; my main client project wrapped up on December 20th. It was an intense sprint finish to the year, and since then, after some genuine rest, I’ve mainly been getting my feet back under the desk, and slowly trying to bring the shape of 2025 into focus.

    What was I up to in the past six-ish months?

    Google Deepmind - further prototyping / exploration

    I returned to the AIUX team at Deepmind for another stint on the project we’d been working on (see: Summer 2024 Worknotes), taking us from September through to the end of the year. This was meaty, intense, and involving, but I’m pleased to where it got to.

    This time, the focus was in two areas: replatforming the project onto some better foundations, and then using those new foundations to facilitate exploring some new concepts.

    This went pretty well, and I got to spend some good time with Drizzle (now in a much better place than when I first used it a long while ago; rather delightful to work with) and pgvector. Highly enjoyable joining vector-based searches onto a relational model, all in the same database.

    And I think that’s all I can say about that. Really good stuff.

    Poem/1 - further firmware development

    I continued occasionally work on the firmware development of Poem/1 with Matt Webb. The firmware was in a good place, and my work focused on formatting and fettling the rendering code, and iterating on some of the core code we’d worked on earlier in the year.

    16nx

    Render of 16nx electronics

    In September, I released a completely new version of the open-source MIDI controller I make. It has no new functionality. Instead, it solves the more pressing problem that you could no longer make a 16n, because the development board it was based on is no longer available. I ported everything to RP2040, and designed it around a single board with all componentry pre-assembled on it. I’ve got a case study of this coming next week, examining what I did and why, but for now, the updated 16nx site has more details on it. Another full-stack hardware project, with equal parts CAD, schematic design, layout, and C++.

    Ongoing consulting

    I kicked off some consulting work on a geospatial games project, currently acting as a technical advisor (particularly focusing on tooling around geodata), and this should continue into 2025. The way we’re working at the moment is with longer meetings/workshops based around rich briefs: the client assembles their brief / queries as a team, I prep some responses, present back to them, and that opens up future discussion. It’s a nice shape of work, focusing on expertise rather than delivery, and makes a good balance with some of the more hands-on tasks I have going on.


    Coming up

    2025 is, currently, quiet; slightly deliberately so, but I’m eyeing up what’s next. I’m back teaching for a morning a week at CCI from mid-February; I have further brief consultancy with the games project on the slate; there are few other possibilities on the horizon. Plus, after a crunchy end-of-year on the delivery front, I’ve got a lot of admin to do, and ongoing personal research.

    But that’s all “small stuff”.

    Like clockwork, here is where I say “I’m always looking for what’s next”. You can email me if you have some ideas. Things I’m into: R&D, prototyping, zero-to-one, answering the question “what if”, interactions between hardware and software, making tools for others to use, applying mundane technology to interesting problems. Perhaps that’s a fit for your work. If so: get in touch.