Posts tagged as weeknotes (page 10)

Week 93 was jam-packed. The majority of it was spent on Swarmize/Lewesdon, hammering out the site’s basic UI. By the end of the week, a lot of the core functionality of the site existed – search was up and working, I’d solved a lot of workflow issues and create an end-to-end of the creation workflow, and integrated all the code from the earlier Sinatra-based spike. Even at this stage, I’ve been understanding the workflows and IA of the project better primarily through the act of making: chipping away at the code to reveal what the product wanted to be all along. Sometimes, that means going backwards to go forwards, but the breakthroughs came in the end, and I was pleased with that.

On Monday, I spent the day with David Varela, planning for the 3-day workshop we’re running in August for CreateInnovate. We came up with a flexible but detailed timetable, a variety of ideas for what we wanted to fit into the workshop, and a coherent structure that ought to help our participants develop their ideas. It was a fun day, and I’m looking forward to delivering the workshop with David.

And on Friday, I spent the day mentoring on the ODI‘s Open Data In Practice course. It was one of the best cohorts for the course yet – the participants all had fascinating backgrounds, and by the end, universal enthusiasm to take what they’d learned back to their day-jobs.

A really strong week on Lewesdon/Swarmize, moving closer to a final UI.

That meant a couple of days of staring at markup, Javascript, and the MDN pages for HTML5 drag/drop. I’m building a UI to help editors design a form, dragging fields into it. Drag and drop feels like a sensible paradigm for this, and because I’m building an internal alpha, I’m going to stick to the HTML5 APIs.

We’re building an early alpha, but there’s still a minimum standard of usability to meet, so I spent quite a while working on reducing flickering elements – a bug that emerges because of how drag events propagate through the browser, which makes entire sense if you’re a DOM model, but not much sense to how humans perceive visual elements. Still, some careful work removed almost all the issues here, with a few to solve next week.

I also investigated using Facebook’s React JS to handle the events from the UI and template the form. I was quietly impressed with React: I like that it only really cares about templates and front-end, rather than insisting you build a front-end MVC structure (as Angular or Backbone do).

I stared a lot, but in the end couldn’t see how to apply React to my particular interactions, so I sat down with jQuery, Underscore, and some Underscore templates, and wrote some plain old event-handling Javascript. This turned out to be enough – and quick enough – to get to a satisfying user experience.

I finished up the week building the back-end to store the specification for the form, and then the straightforward server-side templates to generate the form that can be embedded in a web page. I also added a splash of Verify to add some client-side validation. There’ll still be server-side validation, of course, but it feels sensible to maximise the chances of a user submitting useful data to us.

And, finally, I re-used the code from last week to deploy the whole shebang to Elastic Beanstalk and RDS in the final hours of Friday’s working day. I don’t normally deploy on Fridays, but there was no harm done if I didn’t get it done that day, and if I did, it’d be a satisfying conclusion to a busy week.

By the end of the week, UI I’d sketched up as aspirational a few weeks earlier was coming together in its earliest form, and some quick demos at the Guardian got really strong feedback.

So that was a good week on Abberley, and sets up next week nicely.

The majority of this week focused on Swarmize/Lewesdon: writing automatic deployment scripts and spelunking code.

I did spend a morning this week with PAN exploring some work they’ve got on the horizon – some discussion of how to approach development, as well as a good table discussion on the design of the project. Always pleasant to work with one’s studiomates, and I’m looking forward to seeing where the project we talked about goes.

Mainly, though it was Abberley/Swarmize this week. Lots of movement here. A lot of that was moving forward a stub of a web application that’s going to be the primary user front-end to it.

I’m not building that application yet, though. I’m building a tiny Sinatra app that talks directly to our ElasticSearch instance to get a feel for the materials: what queries I’m going to need, how to abstract away from a hard-coded single UI, how to get the whole stack up and running.

I took my hard-coded demo and abstracted just enough to make it easy to build a second demonstration on this app. I think that’s the final goal of this code: beyond that, I may as well work on the real thing. I extracted a lot of classes from the big tangle of code, to see where the boundaries between persisted objects for the front-end app, and interfaces to ElasticSearch (and other APIs) would lie.

I also worked on writing deployment code for the app. I’m deploying onto Amazon Elastic Beanstalk, because the whole stack is running on Amazon instances, and I want to play ball with the other developers – and stay inside their security group.

Rather than using the magic of auto-deployment out of git, I’ve been writing deployment code by hand. In part, to understand what’s actually happening – but also because I’m deploying out of a subdirectory, and Amazon’s “magic” code doesn’t play ball with subtrees.

My first pass at this code was a bash script that bundled up a zipfile of the app, pushed it to S3, created a version of the app with that package, and then applied that version to the live environment. I then rewrote it entirely, using the Ruby Fog library, and abstracting out lots of hardcoded variables, the goal being to make it more configurable and adaptable. It also would save time: Fog made it easy to interrogate the existing environments, so the code wouldn’t re-upload a version if it was already on S3, or make a deployment if one wasn’t necessary (which would throw an error, normally).

This took some time, and I began to doubt the utility of it. My doubts went away on Friday, when, with the aid of a few new configuration variables, I pushed the whole lot straight onto the Swarmize AWS account in no time at all. Time spent up-front to save time throughout. And: as a result of that work, I now understand much more about EB as a stack, and how I’ll go on to use it.

As part of that work, I submitted a patch back to Fog – the tiniest, simplest patch – but the pull request was accepted. It’s nice when open source works like everybody tells you it does.

By the end of the week, the end-to-end demo was out of the “rough and ready” version and feeling a lot more polished. I wrapped up the week by researching some Javascript techniques and libraries for Abberley’s front-end, which I’m going to break ground on next week: a Rails app, with its own persistence layer, that’s slowly going to replicate the crude functionality I already have. But to begin with, I’m going to be working out how to make the UI I’ve designed work within it, which I’m rather looking forward to. Week 92 will be a meaty week of HTML and Javascript.

Week 90 was busy, but with not a vast amount to report.

Lewesdon pushed forward: getting a fairly good 1.0 set of wireframes; building out a little more of the architecture; really understanding how the thing is going to come together. We’re heading towards a very early end-to-end demo, and I’m hoping that’ll come together in Week 91. This week, though, was spent continuing to chip away: drawing, and coming to understand more about Amazon Elastic Beanstalk.

I spent Thursday and Friday at the BBC Connected Studio for their Natural History Unit, as part of a team put together by Storythings. It was an intensive couple of days, but I think we were all pleased with the pitch we put together, and it was a delight to work with Matt, Darren, Silvia and Stephen. We’ll hear if our pitch was successful later in the month.

A quiet week carving away at Lewesdon: working out what it is and what it needs. After last week’s long explanation, there’s not so much to say this week: I’ve just been head down, trying to work out what the product is, moving it forward by writing and drawing.

I’ve described this process as being like pitching myself: telling myself a story, and then listening to see if it makes sense. When it doesn’t, I reframe it. There have been a few useful breakthroughs in my thinking, which usually generate as many questions as answers, but I think that’s good right now. The team are slowly feeling more confident in the ideas I’m putting forward to them, and we’ve begun to ask a few people who are likely to be impacted by the product for initial feedback.

The project I call Lewesdon is, incidentally, Swarmize – a data capture and aggregation platform at the largest scale. The Knight Foundation have now announced the grants, so it’s only reasonable to mention its real name here.

It’s moving forward, and I hope, swiftly enough – but my time leaps between observing, making, observing, making, and it’s tough work to balance it all and not lose momentum.

On Wednesday, a brief meeting set up Blackdown, a three-day workshop for CreateInnovate that I’ll be running alongside David Varela. I mentored briefly on this project last year, and am looking forward to three days with some filmmakers to explore what online projects could do for them. I’m also really looking forward to finally working with David.

But mainly, pushing Lewesdon forward, digging with my Wacom stylus, and pushing onwards.

Week 88, and kick-off on Lewesdon.

Lewesdon is entirely greenfield: we started breaking ground on it on Tuesday. There’s a definite broad overview of what we’re doing, and we made some decent headway on beginning to understand how the architecture of the project was going to have to be shaped.

That still doesn’t answer what the product is, though, and there are a lot of specifics to pin down there: how to make it communicable, and from that broad overview make it usable. The shape of the product is such that the end-user largely shouldn’t care about the underlying architecture – which is good, because the architecture doesn’t necessarily resemble the intent.

On the first day, Graham – the other developer and architect on this – and I drew up some broad architecture diagrams, and cut some very basic code: an outward-facing app and UI talking to a back-end service, written in our languages of choice (Ruby and Scala, respectively). The demo was simple, but it was a useful collaboration exercise, and also useful to prod some assumptions.

But I then began stepping back from code: how does all the configuration and management of this manifest to end users? And that’s been a hard question to answer. The only way to make forward movement is to make some assumptions, and start drawing at a reasonable level of detail. As I sketch, new questions arise that need answering, or discrepancies creep in that I have to assess. And, eventually, I share the sketch, we pick it apart, and I start again. It’s slow moving, but it’s the only way I know to think through this: to think with a pen or stylus, and then see how hot or cold I am.

Friday saw a couple of breakthroughs here, late in the day, after a day of sketching that led to some chats with Matt M, and I’m hoping they’ll help me start week 89 at a bit of a run. We’ll get there, but right now, I’m just going to keep chipping away.

Otherwise, I spent Week 88 exploring some feasibility for a quick sketch, and confirming a few other small pieces of work – which required me to plan out my calendar for the summer in some detail. It turns out that I now know that in quite some detail, and I am pretty much full up until November – primarily Lewesdon at the Guardian, and then smaller consultancy and workshops around this.

From a business-and-financial perspective, that’s a relief; from a work perspective, it’s going to be busy and full of exciting challenges; but it also means that I’m going to be quieter for a bit. Less to show, because I’m head down working on things. The good kind of quiet.

Now, the task is to do the work, giving it space to breathe and flow.

Week 87 brought some much-needed focus to my calendar for the next few months.

The big news was the confirmation of Lewesdon. This is another project with the Guardian. I’ll be able to talk more about that shortly, but it’s going to be an interesting few months wrangling data and building tools that talk to one another. I’m looking forward to working with the rest of the team, if only for the challenge!

I also confirmed a few other much smaller projects – workshops and the like. They fit neatly around Lewesdon, and will make for a nice change of pace. I also confirmed a speaking engagement towards the end of the year.

And I kicked off a new back-burner project, currently for myself, codenamed Abberley. It’s a very tiny poke at an idea for a product, and the main thing that’s interesting is not the functionality but a few design patterns. I’ve shown a tiny draft of it to people and had some encouragement, so I’m going to keep chipping away in a few meetings.

There was also a final burst of work on Housedon.

Busy, and a bit scattered, then, but the result of the past couple of weeks since returning from SF is that the next few months are much clearer. That feels like a good result, and I’m looking forward to the first few days of sketching a clearer picture of Lewesdon next week.

Back into things after two weeks away. Solid seemed successful, and I came away with a fair few new thoughts. I’m also hoping to have a But the focus for Week 86 was pinning down work for the summer.

That’s edging closer, but it meant a week of meetings, planning, and getting the house in order.

The meetings were diverse and interesting – focusing on software implementation work and IOT-type work – and a few threads coming in via email mean that plans for the next few months are slowly firming up (albeit not final, if you’re thinking of getting in touch). I always find this tense – it’s the moments before an aircraft comes into land, as it were – and it also makes having several potential plans harder as they all begin to demand more emotional energy. Soon, possibility should resolve into certainty, and we’ll go from there.

I also spent a short while putting some finishing touches to Housedon, which should be launching very soon.

Really, though, a quiet week of preparation and thinking whilst my bodyclock returns to BST.

No work this week: on holiday, in the rolling hills of North California. It was excellent.

I’m writing this from the US, where I’ve been in San Francisco for Solid.

My talk – A Lamppost Is A Thing Too was a revision of the talk I gave at FutureEverything. However, I expanded a section at the end about what civic connected objects could be and showed Columba, a prototype of a connected wayfinding device for hire bikes.

I’m hoping to get a version of the text online in the next week or two, as I don’t think I’m going to be delivering that talk in that precise form again.

Otherwise, I’ve been bathing in sessions and catching up with old friends – as well as lots of new faces I’ve met at the conference. As ever with these events, the value emerges a bit later. I go to conferences to have new thoughts, not to remember what other people tell me. There’s been some really strong sessions, especially on Thursday (the second day) – and a lovely time talking to Richard Isaacs of Fisk about organs and organbuilding.

The only other frustrating news this week is that it looks like Bardon had fallen through. A shame; it would have been an interesting project, but this is all part of planning, and the pipeline should take account of it. So it’s worth mentioning I’m definitely available for work from early June; if you’ve got a project that might suit (keywords: web applications, ‘creative technology’, interaction design, connected objects) do get in touch.

And now, the out-of-office is on, and I’m on vacation for Week 85. Back shortly.

Busy, busy, lemon busy. Week 83 has involved many spinning plates, several planes coming into land, and a fair few mixed metaphors.

First: writing a talk for Solid. This is going to be a bit of a rejig of my FutureEverything talk, with a fair bit of new material about a new project I’ll be announcing at the conference. I think it’s in a good place, but it took the first couple of days this week to get there – building slides, writing text, re-editing films.

I managed to fit in a small amount of maintenance work on Housedon, which should be ready to launch at the beginning of June.

Wednesday, I spent some time helping Spitalfields Music – on whose Programme Advisory Committee I sit – with some audio production work.

I spent many free minutes this week putting the finishing touches to the content for the overhaul of this website which is now live – and which you’re looking at! In particular, wrapping up all the content for the Projects section of the site, that will act as an ongoing portfolio. It’s not comprehensive yet, but it’s at least live – and there’ll be something new here next Wednesday.

And finally, a meeting at the end of the week that ought to set up some work for June – a data-structuring project called Bardon.

Very busy, squeezing in all the finishing touches to many projects prior to being in the US next week. I’m going to be in San Francisco from the 20th May, and at Solid for both Wednesday and Thursday. Do say hello if you’re there. For now, I’m taking Hutton to show some friends and peers, and then having a well-deserved drink before the travel and speaking ahead.

Week 82: continued work on Hutton, amidst a bout of illness.

Hutton is taking shape. I put together a short, sixty-second film explaining it this week, which is one of the last components of it prior to decloaking it as part of my talk at Solid. That also meant testing the it out in anger – Hutton is an object – as part of the filming.

It’s definitely functional, and using it has given me some insight into changes that I’d make in future versions. It’s also highlighted some of the compromises in this current version, which is very much an early piece of work, and the compromises were so that I could get it into my hand. It’s enough to understand the problem, confirm my suspicions; it is, after all, an exploration. Still, I was a bit frustrated by some of its jankiness, but right now, that’s not its purpose: its purpose is understanding and communication, and I have to remember that when I’m criticising myself.

I also continued to work on rebuilding and enhancing this website, and that’s almost ready to go. A lot of content work, and some minor WordPress fiddles. Hopefully, I’ll deploy that in Week 83.

A few meetings, along with a few days of illness, and that was a full lid for week 82. Week 83 will consist of writing my talk for Solid, along with some other tidbits, and I’ll be in San Francisco from the 19th May for a bit if you’d like to meet up.

I’m also looking for work opportunities from June, so if any of the work described on the site – software development, IOT prototyping, interaction design, thinking hard about strange problems – feels like a fit, do get in touch.

Not much to write about this week, but will do anyway.

First, more pushing onwards with Hutton: thinking about filming, working out what I need to bring this phase of the project into land in the next week or so. That included a little planning, testing some filming rigs, and getting ready to shoot next week.

I also started work on overhauling this website. The simple list of posts has been useful, but I’d like to be able to show off projects better now I have a decent number to talk about. And I’ve got time in my schedule. So I spent a few days noodling in Sketch, before cranking out some responsive templates and a pile of WordPress code to handle the display of projects.

I also, most importantly, started overhauling the content. The new site has been definitely designed around the content I’m likely to display, and getting it written (not to mention gathering together media) is probably going to be at least as time-consuming as everything technical.

Still, by the end of the week, the code was 90% done and the content about halfway. Should be on course to launching things in the next week or so.

An interview I did with Glen Martin for O’Reilly went live on the O’Reilly website; I think it captures some of the thinking and discussions Pan, Gyorgyi and I had around Hello Lamp Post whilst we were building it. The interview went up prior to Solid, which I’ll be at in two weeks’ time.

And, with a frustrating chunk of admin to fill out time, that was the week. Hutton is in an interesting place right now, and it might have a life beyond this very first prototype; I’ve chatted it over with several peers and friends and they’ve all provided useful insight. So we’ll see where that goes. But for now, the next thing – and the goal for Week 82 – is filming and documenting it.

Big leaps forward for Hutton this week.

Firstly, built the final hardware prototype – a custom shield to sit atop the Electric Imp shield, and the appropriate cabling to make it easy to assemble/disassemble. Then, after a trip Maplin and some wandering around hardware stores, acquiring the components for the housing and spending an afternoon in the workshop, drilling, nibbling and filing the housing for the project. By the end of Thursday, it was all boxed up, running off a battery and 3G, and it even appears to be able to be mounted where I hoped it would.

So that’s most of the build for Hutton done. In week 81, I’m going to work on documenting it and preparing the short film about it.

A few more sketches on Wingreen appear to be taking that to an interesting place. I’m going to have to park it soon, but there’s one more thing I’d like to try before I do.

Also, small pieces of maintenance on previous projects for clients – fixing mapping solutions now that Cloudmade is turning down free projects, and dealing with some bugs in Dundry that reared their head as the client started poking it again.

The pace of self-initiated work is proving a little challenging: maintaining momentum when I’m the client, and not feeling guilty that I’m not doing work for a client, is sometimes tough. It’s important to remind myself that the self-initiated work is an important component of my career, and that it’s not “clientless” work – it’s just that I’m the client and there are no invoices. On the flipside, when it’s going well, it’s very satisfying, and I’m looking forward to working out how to present it.

Another week of beavering away at Hutton: deploying code onto a VPS, getting PostGIS up and running on my server. Spending quite a bit of time in the shell bumping things into life.

The good news is that lots of the projects on the VPS are now ticking away nicely, after a few days wrestling packages and crontabs into shape, so that’s good. And it looks like Hutton’s server and web components are good to go: enough to prototype and test with, for certain, and to build the hardware backend on.

I spent Monday in Brighton whilst the folks at Lighthouse used the Literary Operator for a photoshoot. That gave me time to catch up with some friends and colleagues, and also think hard about the problems in Hutton away from London.

I also spent some time sketching in code on a selection of work I’m calling Wingreen. This is entirely a visual piece of art, displayed and manipulated in software. Each sketch takes me around an hour, because the platform isn’t quite my natural medium. Each sketch also is telling me that there’s something interesting here, but I haven’t quite cracked it yet, so I’m going to keep iterating. Good to take some time to make something that’s purpose is being aesthetically satisfying.

A week focused on self-initiated projects, then – what I call ‘personal projects’ that are actually part of my working practice, rather than just Stuff For Me. I hope to be able to show Hutton soon, and Wingreen eventually.

A short week, too, because of Easter. Where possible, I try to stick to taking Bank Holidays: I may be freelance, but it suits everybody else in my life, and (as Michael Lopp has pointed out), time off is important to one’s working practice, not just to one’s energy reserves. So a slightly shorter week 79 – and a shorter week 80 to come next week, too.

Most of the week was taken up with a workshop at the National Maritime Museum facilitated by Caper, exploring ideas for digital interactions around their Great Map. Three days of “marker fumes and coffee”, and lots of ideas and concept to show the curators and museum staff at the end. Caper assembled a great team, and it was a fun three days; really hope the museum felt so too.

I wrapped up a rough edit of the podcast I’d been producing on Monday, and otherwise, spent the rest of the week focusing on a few personal projects: fettling my VPS and upgrading it (finally) to Ruby 1.9.x, in preparation for fixing the ghost*-apps that are in need of maintenance following changes to Foursquare’s API. Not exciting work, but very satisfying to spend a day in the shell getting things just so.

(The server languished on an old version of Ruby because it primarily just runs Twitter bots; most of my Ruby webapps are all on Heroku, but that’s changing for a few, and so I want to get my house in order).

I spent Monday and Tuesday in Manchester, where I was speaking at FutureEverything. The talk seemed to go well, and the rest of the conference was very good indeed: lots of great talks and great people all in one space. I got home late, and quite tired, on Tuesday, but it had been a great couple of days.

After FutureEverything, it was a relatively quiet week.

I spent Wednesday afternoon helping a music charity I work with a little learning how to podcast. Or rather: helping them set things up so they could. That meant running over how to capture live recordings, setting up a Dropbox workflow where I could help them edit things, how to publish to WordPress, and how we could post content to iTunes as well. I’m going to continue this as a small side-project over the next few months, helping them with production and the technical aspects of publishing, but we covered a lot of ground and they were enthusiastic.

Friday was spent mentoring at the ODI’s Open Data in Practice course. This was my third ODIP course, and as ever, it was great to help the delegates bring some of the ideas to life on the final day, as well as to help them with their understanding of and ideas around Open Data.

Week 77 brought a very hectic March to an end. April should be more peaceful: a couple of workshops, but time also to take some personal days, and focus on the project where I’m the client that have been neglected. I’m looking forward to those.

Most of the week was spent working on the talk for FutureEverything: writing, a bit of research, a bit of continuing to tinker with electronics (a project called Hutton). The electronics are part of a prototype that’s important to the talk – a demonstration of a conceit. It’s not going to be complete before the conference, but worth continuing to push on with: having at least some work to talk about in a space feels important, so I continue to hack on things. And perhaps I can hint at some work in progress.

Otherwise, a few quick meetings, some work getting Hello Lamp Post ready for Designs of the Year, and my last few days of code on Contributoria.

And, on Tuesday night, PAN, Gyorgyi and I all descended on the Design Museum for the Designs of the Year nominees’ party. As previously mentioned, it’s a great honour for Hello Lamp Post to be nominated. It’s on display there for the next few months, along with the rest of the nominees, so do check it out!

In one sense, a straightforward week: entirely spent on Contributoria.

In other senses, more complex: I’m wrapping up my time on Contributoria, and thinking about what’s coming next. That’s increasingly looking like working on a few personal projects – various things have fallen over, thanks to changes in the Foursquare API; various things need pushing forward to the next phase, and dedicated time would be good.

Adding to the complexity is dealing with clients, which is always – for good or ill – the complicated part of business. In this case, the thing I’m finding hard is working out how to say ‘yes’ and how to say ‘no’ – especially to good projects I’m interested in but can’t, currently, see a way to take on.

This is all much harder than sitting down and writing code or sketching or building circuits, and it takes its toll from time to time. This is why downtime – be it for projects, or for rest – is important, especially if the business is to be successful and sustainable. Monday, then, was spent wrapping up a long weekend away, looking at the sea and striding over hills. A space to empty my head, consider what might be coming, work out how to do some things, and how to say others.

And if that all sounds a bit honest: well, weeknotes tend to go better when (within reason) I say what’s in my head.

I also spent some time on Friday on the phone to Kars. We occasionally have catch-up calls with one another. Nothing formal; just some time spent talking to one another about our practice, how work is, seeing what small business in Europe looks like from different angles. It’s always interesting to hear what Hubbub is up to, and it’s a useful perspective on my own work – and much appreciated!

Next week: wrapping up a few things, and preparing for FutureEverything.

A fairly focused week. First, two days of workshopping and sketching on Botley, the goal of which was to narrow down which of a variety of prototypes the team would be taking forward. Intensive, and the kind of days fuelled by coffee and marker pens that leave you reeling a little by the time they’re done. But: good work done, good decisions made.

Then, the rest of the week on Haddington/Contributoria: primarily setting up some loose project management, and writing a lot of documentation. This is my last month on Contributoria, and I want to get a lot of things in place so that it’s easy for other developers to dive into the project.

Not much more to report, really: a lot of running around and typing. Next week is a bit more settled – at least, on the running around front; the typing is a bit of a constant.