Posts tagged as ruardean

Week 100 pulled me in three directions, all of which needed a fair amount of attention to complete before a holiday in week 101.

On the Wednesday, I went to Watershed’s Making the City Playable conference, and delivered a slightly tweaked version of Driftwood. I had lots of great conversations, especially during the Open Sessions, and it was a pleasure to catch up with several friends and colleagues I’d not seen for a while. Sadly, I couldn’t stay for the second day.

I spent Thursday wrapping up Ruardean, delivering wireframes, slides, and a technical brief for the digital component of the theatre show. Hopefully it builds on what Bohdan, Ben and I discussed the week before, and will act as firm foundation for what’s to come. They’re running a Scratch at BAC next week, and they’ll talk a bit about the digital component on the Friday night. (I’m away for week 101, hence shipping early).

And there rest of the week was Swarmize/Abberley. I began the week writing siege-like scripts to bombard Swarmize with results, to get a feel for how the site functioned with a more realistic volume of data. This quickly led to some front-end changes, and also provided the foundation for building a first prototype of time-series graphs.

We integrated a Cloudfront CDN set-up, in order to cache stylesheets and (more importantly) CSV files for completed swarms. I overhauled some out-dated backend code, and worked with Graham on a shared piece of data that affected both the Scala and Ruby apps.

Sadly, the Swarm we were going to run in public during week 101 fell through – but at the very end of the week, another opportunity presented itself, and we focused on rigging things up to make it work. We’re really keen to test Swarmize with live data, and as the first live test runs through week 101, it’ll give us a better of understanding of what to design around – and what the editors work with it need.

A good week 100: lots of balls in the air, and now they need to be caught appropriately in the coming weeks.

It had to happen at some point: the first big lapse in weeknotes. Everything’s been very busy – albeit largely focused on the same thing.

So what’s happened in those weeks?

Primarily: Swarmize/Lewsdon. The past four weeks has seen lots of progress here. After the big demo in week 95, we had another demo in week 96 where we shared the project with editors, journalists, and technical staff – many of whom had seen it at its earliest stages. This led to a variety of features requests and a lot of useful feedback, which we were able to feed into the ongoing work.

The main focus of my development in that time was permissions management – dreary as it may sound, the likelihood that one user and one alone will only work on a Swarm was low. So giving others permissions on them was going to be important – and that meant implementing a permission-granting system.

That also meant confirming that the entire application tested permissions appropriately throughout, and I spent several days knuckling down and writing some controller tests. They’re all a bit verbose, and I’m not sure it’s the best way of achieving this – but it means I have programmatic proof of who can do what, which is important when there’s a boundary between public and private content on the site.

We also spent some time refactoring the configuration of components to be shared between the Rails and various Scala apps. We’ve cut down on duplication a lot as a result.

And, based primarily on editorial feedback, I implemented various fixes to make it easier to edit swarms for minor things – typos and the like – after they’ve launched, as well as offering some more complex edit interactions for developers who want more control.

We’re at the point where we hope to test much of the toolchain in anger in the coming weeks, and I’m really excited about having live data in the system.

It wasn’t just Swarmize in this period, though. Around the August bank holiday I went up to the Peak District for Laptops and Looms, a very informal gathering in Cromford. It was a good few days for the spirit: clear air, good discussions in the morning, good trips in the afternoon, various thoughts provoked. I chatted a bit about making things to make noise with, and whilst it was really just voicing some thoughts on an interest, there were a few notes it hit that I’d like to return to in the coming months – perhaps in another period of quiet. Lovely company, and a good way to revitalise the head. (I also managed to get up Kinder Scout on the Sunday, which was excellent).

Finally, I spent two days in Week 99 working with Bohdan Piasecki and Ben Pacey, developing a digital brief for their theatre/digital work Palimpsest City. Two days of discussion, lots of sketching on playing cards, and whittling down some core details from a big picture. I’ll be writing that up for them in week 100, but it was a delightful two days: thoughtful, intense, and a change of pace and topic from the usual.

In week 100, I’m in Bristol for Making the City Playable, and cranking hard on Swarmize. And, I hope, returning to more regular weeknotes. I always knew there was going to be a blip – and now I know what it looked like.