Posts tagged as weeknotes (page 13)

Back to Playable City – Muncaster – this week. I spend a few days with Sam at Pan, really honing down the conversation mechanic and making sure the design supports everything we hoped it would. And then, for the second half of that work, focusing on getting a working implementation for playtests next week.

Conversation-systems – as I have learned many a time, most notably in Havasu – inevitably turn out to be messy tangles of procedural code, so it’s worth working hard to keep the codebase as sane as I can. That tends to involve drawing lots of flowcharts, documenting not only the expected routes through the system, but also the way the software implements those – which for various reasons isn’t always the same. It’s a good, visual way to make sure I don’t get lost in a maze of my own making.

On Wednesday, I went to Telefonica Digital to give a short talk about data visualisation at an internal hackday. That was a good excuse to do some new thinking, and I’m pleased with the new talk that emerged; some useful ideas to continue to think on, and which will no doubt feed into future talks. Thanks to Paul for the invite.

I also spent an afternoon working one final feature into Detling that we all agreed needed to be slotted in; it really closes the loop of the alpha, and makes the potential of the product much more obvious. Nice to drop it in at the last minute with relative ease. We’re showing the project to the BBC next week.

And finally, this week’s freelancer top tip: GOV.UK has ICS files for bank holidays. Thanks to subscribing to that a while back, I remembered to take Monday off. Ice cream and the smell of the sea are a very restorative way to kick the week off.

With Detling wrapped, something that was loosely meant to be a week off.

Not a holiday per se, but no client work. I think, in the end, I took about half the week off, and the rest rightly falls into Phil’s definition of work – nothing for a particular client, but definitely work on my own professional output.

I spent a little longer futzing with electronics, and mainly running into some horrid issues with bitwise maths that just weren’t entertaining enough for what was meant to be a relaxing week of research – so I put them to one side.

Instead, I spent much of Monday exploring the viability of a particular approach to a project (which is currently called Swinside). In this case, that was the integration of MIDI control surfaces, Ableton Live, Quartz Composer, and using webservices to generate text to be rendered by Quartz. (It’s a fun, if bizarre, toolchain to work with).

By the end of the day, I had an ugly demo up and running – practically a screensaver – but it was a real blue triangle moment for me, and super-satisfying as such.

“Blue triangle moment“ refers to a story I can no longer find the Gamasutra link for, so consider it apocraphyal: early Playstation devs, working on getting code running on their new devkits. They slaved over lots of things for a while, and at the end of their labour… a solitary blue triangle was rendered on screen. They cheered. Their project manager was less than enthusiastic – all that time just to make a single triangle appear? No, they explained, it’s not just a triangle. It’s a triangle that an artist drew in his 3D program, saved to disk, and we just imported the artist’s work, told it where to appear, hit build, and got an executable game. The blue triangle may be underwhelming, but it was proof the pipeline worked. Within another week, they had textured, animated, 3D characters appearing on the PSX. The hard work was proving the interconnection in a functional system – not rendering the triangle alone. The triangle meant much more than itself.

What I’ve learned is: yes, the bits I’m thinking about joining together would join together. An interesting feasibility study.

Otherwise, I spent the week in a variety of work-related meetings. Most were interesting early-stage conversations and some hypotheticals, although a very short piece of work – Wilton – has emerged, with After The Flood in a few weeks’ time. That should be interesting.

And, finally, I appear to have got myself an accountant. Freeagent has got my quite far, but I’m going to take an expert’s advice when it comes to tax returns.

Update: Tom Stuart rightly corrects me – it’s a black triangle, not a blue one.

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.

Another head-down week.

It might seem it’s not so useful to write about the head-down weeks, where I’m chipping away at design or code. I think it’s still worth writing these notes: they’re a useful way of me reflecting on progress, on what could be improved, and a good way to focus back on exactly what happened in the past seven days. It’s rarely as simple as ‘did more X‘; rather, it’s useful to measure the pace of the work.

This was the final full week on Detling, and a lot of my focus was on some final pieces of functionality and bringing it into land. That meant finishing up the design work, as well as beginning to make sure the distributed team were all up to speed on everything that was going on. By the end of the week, several strands of work – production, editorial, testing, design, development – were all motoring forwards in parallel, and it was great to see everything sync up.

I also implemented simple image uploads for some editorial functionality. Heroku, having a read-only filesystem, doesn’t let you upload data through webforms to its servers; you need to store uploads somewhere else, such as S3. However, I continued the theme of gluing services together (as mentioned last week) and set up Cloudinary. Again, a lovely, seamless process: dropping in the gem, plus Carrierwave, and image uploads (along with offline processing/resizing) were integrated. It’s great to see such common modules of functionality extracted to services – and to be implemented so well.

Otherwise, I spent a lot of the week bouncing between vim and the Github issues list – marking things off, leaving notes for myself, and assigning away where appropriate. The pile went down faster than it went up, and I think all’s in a great place for the final few days of code and testing. I’m looking forward to be able to share the work soon.

A couple of brief – but interesting – meetings, one about a talk, another about music and technology, broke up the week. That was 27.

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.

Week 25. Which, indexing from zero, is the 26th week. Which means I’ve been doing this half a year.

I think it’s going alright.

The majority of this week was spent on Detling, building invitation systems that allow people to alert friends to concerts they’d like to talk about or listen to together.

Creating invitations is very straightforward. Handling acceptance is harder.

For this prototype, we’re just using email for sign-in, and a way of identifying who to send invitations to. So that leads to the situation that Dropbox has solved well: you an accept an invite to one address from another one that has a valid Dropbox account. That means even if your friend only knows your work email, you’ll be able to accept the email from the home account you signed up to Detling with. And, of course, if they invited the account that Detling already knows about, the invite can appear on your homepage, dashboard, etc.

So that’s what this week focused on: a lot of workflow, and everything necessary to support it. I spent some time running my planned solutions by other members of the team. Though they’re not developers, I find it helps me to think out loud, to check I’ve not made any strange assumptions. This is a bit like rubber ducking, but the feedback you get from another person is always positive.

It’s also a really useful way to start sharing and disseminating project knowledge. I have to explain my Domain Language clearly, and by ensuring that we’ve agreed on not only the solution but also the diagnosis of the problem, I know I’m not wasting time. We have a enough time to measure many times – but only to cut once.

Fortunately, everything appears to be proceeding well, and everyone working on the project is providing useful steerage, insight and ideas. Fizzing along nicely.

And then: a little bit of hacking on an early prototype for Playable City, which is coming together a little – and also exposing some of the awkward seams and edges of our original idea – and a few meetings.

Finally, a conference; I spent Saturday at Ruby Manor, which has always been both a great workout for the brain and a lovely social occasion. This year was no exception: well run, thoughtful, diverse, and a huge crowd of programmers and friends. I left with lots of things to think about, and some notes to myself about where to go with Detling in the margins of my notebook.

This week was all about Detling: finishing up the data-ingest and the “catalogue” display of all content. From this point, we can wrap functionality around it.

I seem to have spent a lot of my professional life working on data-ingest or screenscraping. To be honest: I quite enjoy it. It’s a strange skillset, and scraping is always a kind of hack; I’d dearly love nicely structured data from the getgo.

But by engaging with how human-entered data is structured and organised, you get a good feel for the shape of the information: how well the people working with it know the domain; how much it varies; what the faster-moving layers of it are, that you’ll need to be able to edit later.

To that end, Detling has one of the more refined ingest processes I’ve worked on. A spreadsheet is sucked into a set of holding objects, each object representing one “object” in the spreadsheet – in this case, a concert, the information for which is distributed across two columns and many rows per concert.

To ‘atomize’ the holding object into its constituent parts, an administrator needs to eyeball the scraped data, and correct it where appropriate. This won’t change the holding object – but it will effect the new objects created when we explode and normalize the the holding object. Where appropriate, these fields autocomplete based on values we already know.

(Adding autocompletion meant sticking pg_search in, which has the added bonus of giving me search “for free”, as it were, a bit further down the line. Thanks, Postgres, for your full-text search).

Once the fields are deemed as OK as makes no difference, a click of the ‘atomize’ button fragments the holding object, creating Composers, Venues, Performers and so forth where appropriate – or linking the Concert to existing ones.

From that point, edits to individual objects can still be made, but the bulk of atomisation is done.

It doesn’t sound wildly sophisticated, but it’s where the bulk of the progress this week has been made. My one day demo that I produced in the first week of the project resulted in a superficially very similar site. But it had very limited editing capabilities, and no potential to “massage” the data.

Being able to do that up-front, swiftly and easily, saves a vast amount of time later. I learned this in many hard ways on Schooloscope, a product that relied heavily on other people’s information, and massaging it into shape as the structures of the source data changed year-on-year. So for this project, even though it’s much smaller, I wanted to make sure that an appropriate amount of time was spent on making data-ingest something anybody could do – not just me.

That’s now out of the way – it’s inappropriate to spend much longer on it – and the next few weeks will be about building user-facing functionality; the meat of the product. But it feels good to be where we are now, and to have got there the way we did.

Also, worth noting the domain vocabulary cropping up – Atomize, Ingest, Explode. At Berg, we referred to project languages as Dutch. It’s no problem that a project has its own language – but it’s important that language is shared with everybody. So I’ve kicked off a Glossary page on the Github wiki for the project, and every time I encounter something that I’ve named, I stick it on there. Minimum Viable Documentation goes a lon gway.

A different shape to week 23.

The beginning of the week was spent working on Detling: pitching the results of the discovery week back to the client, taking on board feedback, and then setting up the weeks of work ahead.

I also began work on exploding the raw data into its constituent atoms, and building a page for each one: what I’ve come to call (via Tom Carden and Mike Migurski) the “show everything“ stage of the project. This helps us all see what interconnections are interesting, which aren’t, and also gives me a good heads up on where my parser is failing.

The next step from this is swiftly building the tools to correct and massage the data without overwriting or duplicating information. That requires some simple autocompleters, so that information can be matched to what’s already in the database… and that means I’ll be implementing search a bit earlier than I expected. Material exploration is informing infrastructure.

I spent a morning this week with the chaps from PAN, planning out the first stages of some prototype code we’ll use to poke our Playable City concept: it looks like a short burst of work from me will be what we need to explore the materials of the project; in this case, whether a first stab at the conversation mechanic is as robust as we thought.

On Wednesday I flew to Serbia for Resonate. It’s been an interesting few days in Belgrade. I don’t always go to conferences for what people tell me; rather, I go to see what new ideas I’ll have as a result.

There are a few new things percolating away – mainly about instruments and interfaces, along with a deep-seated need to return to making music, somehow. It’s been interesting to see the world from the perspectives of media art and creative technology. At times, the conference helped me find my own strong opinions – usually in opposition to what I was seeing – but that’s also useful! I found the abundance of what were little more than portfolio shows a bit frustrating, but they were made up for by some talks that voiced clear arguments and narrative (sometimes, on top of what might otherwise have been a straight portfolio show).

I definitely haven’t finished processing Resonate; when I do, I’m sure it’ll lead to more writing. That’s one thing it really reminded me: I need to write things that aren’t weeknotes from time to time. The discipline is good, as is the perspective it gives, but it’s no substitute for other forms of writing.

Week 22: time for a new project. This week I kicked off Detling: a seven-week or so web prototype around social listening, which I’m working on with Caper and BBC Radio 3.

We began with a week of discovery: exploring the fabric of the product a bit, deciding what it was we were really making. Lots of sketching and blackboards, a day or so prodding a spreadsheet until I could tear it into reasonably satisfying chunks (and prove that doing so was feasible), some graphic design exploration. It’s another project with a tight timeline, but we’re focusing on making it deliverable, manageable, and self-explanatory. Should be an interesting one.

I wrapped up Dundry in some spare moments, and the BBC Knowledge & Learning team seem very pleased with that.

And, otherwise, set up some meetings in April and May that sound promising for the summer.

Next week: more on Detling, some work on Playable City, and off to Serbia. A bit about that in another post.

Very busy this week.

Early in the week, I helped Amblr with a workshop in Bristol as part of their REACT Sandbox project, The Next Time[line]. Coming into a short project very briefly, I wasn’t quite sure what role I’d take – design? Code? Something else?

In the end I bounced between people, in a role very similar to what we used to call “Sheriff” in Berg workshops: holding people to their word, making sure explanation is clear, being firm, pushing through to get decisions made. Hard work, but it was a productive two days, and everything’s lined up for the final weeks of the sandbox. Always interesting to work on other projects like this.

However, the bulk of the week was focused on bringing Dundry in to land. That means: implementing one last feature, just enough polish to make it feel less hacky and more like it has the potential to be a thing, and lots of documentation.

I’d produced wireframes early on to sketch the interactions in the project – but they’re not the only documentation I’ve been working on. I’ve also been making notes on the data structures within the project – simple explanations of the schema, of course, accompanied with some of the reasoning behind how they ended up there – and talking a little about the decisions made in the rendering layer, which, though not the focus of the project, turns out to be where a lot of the engineering meat of the prototype lies, and which needs to have a very carefully considered architecture in any future versions.

And I’m probably going to produce a short screencast. Videos are useful cultural currency – easily shared – but also serve as documentation, illustration, and proof of a project that works even offline; live demos are great, but not when you haven’t got a network connection. I’ve been making little videos throughout the project to demonstrate it to the client, and it appears to have been helpful.

I’m hoping to ship final documentation and code – or at least, nearly final – before the beginning of Week 21.

And then it’s onto new things: next week sees the beginning of Detling over at Caper, which should be really interesting: a tight, creative project, about social listening.

Busy, then – and a learning experience about how to slot various projects together, how to make sure that timelines don’t collide too much, and how to push myself forward at a reasonably rate when I need to get things done. As ever: onwards.

Week 20: another week on Dundry. This week focused on a second tier of interactions and visualisations, more complex than last week – but also some of the key differentiators of this product; the things that make it interesting and unusual.

By and large, this was pretty successful. The sensations we’d hope the interactions would generate really seem to be coming to life, and there’s already a clear leaping-off point for Week 21.

The only point that felt like a misstep was early in the week. In preparation for a new feature, I looked at refactoring the graphics rendering: ultimately, changing the SVG elements output, and how the code that generates them works.

Initially, this seemed like a smart idea. By the end of that day, I changed my mind: I’d overhauled a lot of code without anything moving forward, and we weren’t back at the point I’d been at the end of Week 18. So I made a decision. My job on Dundry isn’t engineering. This is an interaction prototype; design rendered as software. To that end, I’d leave the renderer as it is, focus on new functionality, and deliver the new feature in a slightly altered manner – that wouldn’t require such huge refactoring.

And, at the same time: I’d learned something more about the demands of the SVG pipeline that would have to be accused in production – something to go into the documentation, and based on real experience.

The rest of the week went well, and by Friday, a new set of features and interactions were in good health.

Tuesday also saw a brief detour to Cambridge, to give a lunchtime talk as part of Culture Hack East – sharing some of the process and outputs of *Spirits Melted Into Air* to arts and technology professionals.

A busy week, entirely spent working on Dundry.

Dundry is an interaction prototype for BBC Knowledge & Learning. The goal is to bring something to life in just enough fidelity to get a feel for how it works – to feel the material of the product in our hands, to see what works and what doesn’t, and to leave it in a state that product owners and stakeholders can play with for a while once I’m done.

To that end, I worked on some wireframes and interaction design to understand the scope of the project – and now I’m both bringing those to life, and tweaking the design as I go, based on the understanding I get from using it.

I’ve made good progress, I think, though it’s a very intense process. I go on deep dives into tangled knots of D3, emerging a few hours later with marked progress, and a sore head from callbacks and closures. Needless to say, it’s really satisfying: full of the best kind of fiero. It’s also been heartening to already see some of the interactions I hoped would be satisfying turn out to be exactly that.

There’s also a degree of material understanding going on. There’s a lightweight Rails back-end, but most of these interactions are within the browser, and written in Javascript. To that end, I’ve been wrestling with the DOM event model.

For instance: one interaction involves highlighting an element when the mouse moves over it. This was working reasonably well, but would occasionally flicker as the mouse moved vertically. It turned out that whenever the mouse crossed a “cursor” line I was drawing (representing the X-position of the mouse), it would fire mouseout on the hovered element – because in the browser’s model, it had moved out of the hovered element and over the cursor. I could have left the flicker in, but this is a really central piece of the work, that someone’s going to interact with a lot. So I rewrote the code, checking to see which element the mouse’s co-ordinates resided within… rather than which element was firing mousemove events. Was that more work? Absolutely. Was it the right thing to do here? I think so. Even in a prototype, certain elements need more polish than others, to show that they’re what we’re looking at – and in this case, the hover interaction needed to be solid.

And then, having done some work like that, I zoom back out to the high level to see how the whole thing is fitting together, before diving back down to some fine-grained Javascript.

Like I said, most of the time, hugely satisfying.

In other project news, given that Steve Bowbrick has announced my involvement, it’s probably worth decloaking Firle as Radio 3’s Musical Map of Britain. A nice tight project, and I’m really glad the Breakfast Show team are so happy with it.

Next week: more deep hacking on Dundry, with a short detour to Cambridge to speak at Culture Hack East 2013 about Spirits Melted Into Air.

Everything’s getting busy. I kicked off the week pushing through a bit further on Crowborough: getting to an end-to-end demo, checking everything works out.

I met a few people for various lunches to see what they’re up to, including some of the Makeshift crew.

In the middle of the week, I kicked off work on Dundry: lots of wireframing and thinking. Though the wireframes and interaction work were sent off on Friday, there’s a lot of detritus – felt-pen sketches all over my desk, exploring other avenues, seeing how things felt, before I committed them to vectors. Dundry is going to be occupying me for the remainder of the month, and the first week in March; it should be an exciting, busy project, with some really tangible outputs – once we’re happy with the sketches, the rest of the sketching will happen in code.

On Friday, Firle launched, and seems to have been well-appreciated by both the client and it’s users; always good to have a successful launch.

And at the end of Friday, I took Crowborough down to Berg, where I showed it at their Friday demos. I’ll write more about it soon: it’s a Little Printer publication, which takes a fairly obvious product – the to-do list – and re-interprets it in somewhat unusual ways. Playing with the various materials involved (paper, Bergcloud, SMS, and Little Printer publications) was entertaining and illuminating. And: a lovely platform to write code for.

Things are ramping up, then. Week 19 is primarily going to be solid, head-down work on Dundry.

Much of this week was spent wearing what Matt Sheret has called one’s learning smile.

There was a degree of fettling Firle and trying to bring it in to land – which focused on bugfixing and wrestling with IE8’s awful understanding of caching headers.

There was work on setting up Dundry: refining details in order to get a contract sorted.

Towards the end of the week, as Dundry stalled, I decided to fire up a small personal project to keep my hands in. Crowborough is a small project for Berg’s Little Printer. It’s a simple tool, with an unusual interface and some strange restrictions (that lead to strange affordances). Two afternoons work saw an end-to-end alpha, which already feels really fun, and I’m hoping to push it to completion in spare minutes.

Crowborough helped my mood and attitude. My learning smile is primarily a result of learning how to manage scope creep, deal with delays, and not worry about work running into future work. This is the real learning process of freelancing. Crowborough was useful because rather than being a reading learning process – and I’ve been doing a lot of reading recently – it was learning with my hands. As usual, I was surprised by how swift it was, and the materiality of it – paper, SMS – was great fun.

It boosted my confidence and meant that in a quiet week, I still had something to show for it. So I’m going to push through with hacking on it in week 18; busy is good, and sometimes we have to invent our own busy.

Tuesday saw a trip to Bristol, to the PM Studio, where PAN, Gyorgyi and I kicked off Hello, Lamppost with Clare and Verity. A good long meeting, with great insight and conversation, and then an afternoon wandering a grey, damp Bristol, looking at the materials we’d have to work with – the streets themselves.

The rest of the week was spent primarily on business development. Enough research to put together a quote for Chanctonbury – a brief but super-interesting data-wrangling project.

And, separately to that, a long meeting on Monday, followed by subsequent thinking, writing, and developing for Dundry: a meaty prototyping project that could likely consume February. Dundry has the potential to sprawl and overflow, but I think it’s most interesting when it’s ratcheted down, nice and tight: expressing the concept through a couple of core conceits, rather than trying to let it be anything it wants from the start.

A few other meetings filled out the week – one about writing, rather than technology, which was really interesting – and a bit of illness laid me lower than I’d like towards the end.

The usual, then: developing, pitching, lining things up for February – one or two things are almost on the starting blocks.

A cold and snowy start to the week, so I stayed at home for Monday, and held phone meetings around the content we’ll be using in Detling.

Over the early days in the week, I wrapped up a lot of little loose ends on Firle, which should be going live soon.

I took advantage of some downtime to build and deploy a new look for tomarmitage.com – a vanity domain that I’m using to document my professional practice. That means weeknotes, like this one, and posting about work will end up here (though likely cross-posed to infovore.org). It feels better than a plain page, and over time, I’ll backfill a portfolio and work out a way to display work well. For now, it’s a simple layout that lists things, and has all the salient details future employers might need. It’s backed with the usual tricks – a sensible automated deployment strategy to make keeping it up to date a breeze – and it felt good for a few days to be cutting new ground and designing in my browser.

Finally, on Friday, I went to The Design of Understanding – Max Gadney’s excellent conference at St Bride Library, now in its third year. A really good day out, with some excellent talks and plenty to chew on. My favourite conferences are the ones that leave me thinking new thoughts, and I certainly felt a few beginning to form in the time since.

A slow week, that livened up towards the end.

Early on, there were some meetings and phonecalls about Muncaster, which seemed to go well. I should be able to write more about that project soon. Various evening meetings pushed a few little tickles of ideas further forward, so will keep following up on them.

Thursday and Friday were spent working on Firle: a very last-minute project, building small content-managed maps for part of the BBC. Should be able to point at this soon. Though last-minute, and very brief, we managed to get to a really nice point with this: a sane, pleasant CMS; intuitive mapping integration with Cloudmade maps through Leaflet; a codebase that’s the right balance of “done proper” and “done on time”. And I got to get my head around a few new platforms. Despite initially implementing it in Cloudmade Web Maps, I ended up porting it to Leaflet, mainly for the better touchscreen support, but the Leaflet API turned out to be very pleasant. I built the backend out of ActiveAdmin, which turned out to be great. I was worried it’d be too dogmatic and not flexible enough, but in fact, it turned out to be the opposite: appropriately customisable, not in any way dogmatic, and nice and clear to build for.

The coming week holds: more news of Muncaster, more looking for options for things up to the end of February.

What I’m learning right now: managing the pipeline – as Sales on a Beermat calls it – has not proven to be a problem: it’s useful to have one, and I keep it up to date and push through it. The tough parts are keeping enough plates spinning at once should any one of them turn into a project. Brighstone was so close to the door but didn’t quite make it in January (though still might in the future); that threw a lot of my estimates and plans, but also threw my confidence a bit. So I’m wearing what Matt calls one’s learning smile and keeping busy, keeping learning, keeping pushing things through the pipeline.

The period between Christmas and New Year is quiet, as expected, so these combined weeknotes are very brief. Still, a few things to note.

Boxing Day saw the broadcast of my Four Thought talk, The Coded World. It’s still available for download from the Four Thought site. There was a really positive reception to it, from what I’ve seen and heard, so I’m very grateful for that.

I returned to the office on the 2nd. Since then, I’ve filed a proposal for an interesting, short project; chased a few other projects and organised some meetings; and spent some time hacking on a short project of my own.

That project has mainly been an exercise in code and deployment, to keep my fingers fresh, and gave me a chance to explore Sidekiq – an asynchronous queue for Ruby built on top of Redis. There’s some loose ends to tidy, and I’ll mention it here when it’s a bit more robust. I’m also looking forward to reviewing its code with a friend – always easier to refactor with a fresh pair of eyes.

And, of course, I wrote my Yearnotes.

And that was Week 12. Week 14 holds some meetings, possibly a presentation, and more hacking. I’m also still looking for projects in early 2012, so get in touch if that sounds relevant.

Happy 2013.

A week of ups and downs. Brighstone, which seemed a likelihood last year, isn’t going to be beginning in January, which is a shame, and led to me looking for new ways to fill the calendar.

Fortunately, there were a succession of meetings this week about future work, with some things to consider. All very different types of work – one physical computing project for the arts, one about integrated, kiosk-like platforms, and one web-based content project. Nice to be exploring this diversity in my work, and I’m hoping some of these might go further.

On Monday, this year’s Year of Links arrived. Very satisfying that, bar the install dance of being on a new computer, the code just worked, and a week later, I had a paperback of the previous year on Pinboard. Really satisfying.

On Tuesday I went down to Stratford-Upon-Avon to present Spirits… to a selection of the team there. It was a straightforward presentation, but it was great to be able to wrap the project by showing them the final output, and the discussions we had around it were excellent – and went towards some interesting potential futures.

Finally, I had a few meetings with the Caper team about Detling, lining things up for our March kick-off – always useful to be lining up planets and ducks, prior to project kick-off.

(And: as Matt’s suggested, I’m going to start publishing these at the beginning of the next week. I wrote them in a spare moment at the weekend, but it’s much better reflecting on the week not on a Friday evening).

Onwards!

And that’s the end of 2012.

A very quiet end to the year: a few little meetings to wrap up one short project and investigate another. Otherwise, I treated it as roughly a half-week, and focused a bit on some personal work, none of which is really near completion.

On Monday, I also built the visualiser for this year’s Radio Roundabout. They wanted something “a bit New Aesthetic“ for this year. I loosely interpreted this brief to produce a Kinect-powered visualisation of the studio.

It’s very straightforward: it takes the IR point cloud in 3D, colours it according to what the video camera can see – and then applies a strokeweight to each point based upon the audio line-in level (RMS).

So what you get is a room full of blobs that pulse along with audio – particularly fine on the Dan Deacon or Todd Terje that played on the show, but fun with spoken-word too.

The whole project – all two hours of gluing other people’s code together – is on Github.

And that was it, really – a few leads on work I’ve followed up, but a quiet end to the year. Weeknotes are now on hold until 2013 – after the Radio 4 talk – and I’m hoping there’ll be a bit more news to share then.

Not a bad start to freelancing, then; here’s to 2013.