Posts tagged as weeknotes (page 3)

Longridge is now fairly positioned on the launchpad.

The structure and broad content of the courses are now signed off; that means all that’s left is writing them (and making a number of films). I had a call about content creation for the project, and that means I’m going to be kicking off equal amounts of writing and production tasks next week. A little bit nervewracking, but we’ve got a plan and a list of things to burn down, and so the job now is to work through it and make sure everybody’s happy. I’m going to be making some spreadsheets to keep track of everything (or, maybe, some crazy walls)

I also kicked some tires on an exercise I was thinking about using on Longridge, and everything seemed to work as I hoped, so that’s a goer. One less thing to worry about.

Over on backburner projects, my prototype PCBs for Dent arrived early in the week, along with the stencils for soldering it up. So I spent Monday bringing the board up: getting the paste applied, getting components on the board, baking them on, and then looking to flash the firmware.

Which, not entirely unexpectedly, just didn’t work at all. Not a complete write-off - I can see the board over SWD, but no joy flashing it, and the main thing that happens when you power it up is that the microcontroller gets really hot. That’s… not the desired functionality.

I wondered if it was my solderpaste, so I built up a second board largely by hand, with only hot-air used for the QFN MCU, but no dice. I went back to the drawing board - EAGLE - and decided that I’d definitely been having some strange ideas about how the schematic should come together. I drew up a Revision B, from some better reference material, and perhaps I’ll send that off soon-ish and we’ll try again. I also spent a while double-checking everything I could about flashing Atmel SAMD51 chips, and learned a fair bit: I might well use a different toolchain next time around.

Anyhow, it’s probably worth another iteration, so that’s a thing to be going on with. It’s going to be a few weeks before new revisions will arrive, which is a good thing, as I’m going to be busy! A long weekend coming up; Week 347, we begin some typing in earnest.

A quiet week spent exploring with my hands.

I continued my explorations of Dokku as a hosting option, spending some time looking at best-practice for deploying Wordpress to it - and then working out how that lined up with my own preferences around deployment (notably, specifying Wordpress as a dependency in composer).

That was a useful exploration - getting hand dirty with some servers, turning something I’d often end up doing by hand into something more automated - and I at least got to something sensible and working by the end of the week.

I spent a day documenting what I’d done. Not ‘documentation’ that resides in the text files I use as a digital notebook; ‘documentation’ other people would find useful. That’s a challenging thing to write clearly and unambiguously. The end result was perhaps too long, but I think it explains itself clearly enough, and includes appropriate code snippets and samples.

I hope I’ll publish that somewhere next week. If nothing else, it was good practice to write some real documentation for something technical, multi-stage, and complex. I’ve got more writing coming up this month, and it was good to get a handle on my pace of writing (and, for technical work, getting a feel for how often I need to bounce between edits and writing). And, who knows, it may still be useful for someone.

On Friday, my circuit boards for Dent arrived from China and I set about assembly. These are the smallest component sets I’ve ever had to assemble - the 0603 is all fine, but the QFN microcontroller has been a pain. (QFN is probably the first of the surface-mount IC packages that is ultra-hard to do by hand, as it has no exposed pins. It’s really designed for a robot and oven to do).

I’ve been practicing with solder paste, stencils, and hot air, and whilst the first stage of my assembly seemed to go OK, the usb socket on the board has possibly not gone in correctly, leading to some powering issues, a very hot chip, and a frustrated me to end the week with.

Still, I have an idea where to take it next week, and I solved a few problems at the firmware/bootloader end for once I’ve got the chip up and running.

Quiet, but busy, and some good studio conversations with my colleagues throughout.

After an intense week 343, 344 was much quieter. I got some feedback on the work so far on Longridge, so spent another afternoon or so wrapping up my work there, going over that feedback, adding some new things, and sending it all off for approval.

A box of parts arrived for Dent. Not much happening there til the prototype boards arrive, however, so that’s sat on my desk.

In “learning things” time, I spent a little while exploring new deployment options for servers. In particular, I spent some time looking at Dokku, a containerised deployment platform that installs to a greenfield server environment and then allows deploys via git pushes. It uses Heroku-style ‘buildpacks’ to provision and configure server infrastructure. I’m not sure I’ll move to it just yet, but a small amount of work got me a setup that will compile Hugo sites upon deployment and then point nginx at the deployed folder. Useful to consider as a way of gardening future servers, and also of standardising deployments and tools for myself.

And at the weekend, I saw in this picture of Richie Hawtin playing live… that he’s got a 16n as part of his rig (spot the faders between the tangle of cables that is his modular synthesizer, and the little 303-clones by his waist):

I was pleased and proud of that.

A busy week: lots of work, not a huge amount to say, as a result.

I spent four days at After the flood on High Vinnalls. This was a product development and data exploration exercise. I worked on exploring some datasets for an ongoing client project over theirs, building tools to quickly spelunk around in the data and establish signal, noise, and see what other things would reveal themselves. Not in order to visualise them, necessarily, nor to make a data-exploration product. Rather, the exploration was to support product development and invention. What products might be possible? Does the data support various ambitions?

ATF presented to the client at the end of the week, so it was an intense few days of thinking, sketching, and coding. Really good to be in the room working closely with designers as we tried to understand the shape of what we’d been given to work with.

In amongst that, I went up to Leeds on Wednesday night to spend all day THursday on a workshop at the University for Longridge. The goal of the workshop was to devise the structure and outline of three short courses I’d been writing. This too was very, very intense; I think we made good progress, but I’ll need to return to what we did in week 344 to finish up a few last things - and to be able to look back on it with the benefits of some perspective!

I also got a goahead at the weekend for an initial exploration into Dent, which may, or may not, turn into a project in due course. For now, it’s a quick pass to just see if anything is possible. This is a small hardware project - very much something on the side, but a nice backburner project if it comes off.

Phew. Busy, busy week.

Longridge is really beginning to motor. I finished writing a the initial preparatory work for a workshop in Week 343. That was harder than planned. Lots of variables are still up in the air, and the later stages of the work are highly dependent on these ones; as a result, I sometimes get tangled trying to think about all the possible outcomes. But: I got enough done to generate the raw materials I was required to for the workshop, which was most important.

Also, the topic area is now well established around in my head, which means I have lots more thoughts still unwritten - some aren’t quite ready for that, others might emerge in the right context. I think that’s all fine: it’s the right place to be in at this point, and will be more things to feed in to the workshop next week.

Towards the end of the week, a short piece of work for After The Flood came in. I’m going to be spending the rest of Week 343 with them, working on some product exploration around data for them - coding, talking, thinking work. Looking forward to working with that team again.

I also have a small hardware project that has had some external encouragement to suggest it’s worth getting to the end of phase zero on it. Phase zero is, I suppose, the point where something reveals if it’s going to be A Thing or not. Sometimes, you do the work, and there’s just not a product there (or not one worth building); better to find that out with as little effort as possible. I’m going to finish up this exploration phase and see where it lands. For now, that means getting some PCBs spun and assembling them when they arrive.

My little React prototype is in good shape. Something clicked and I tore out lots of component-spaghetti. Now there are just enough components. All of a sudden, passing state down looks tidy, rather than baroque. I spent some time adding a few little features, and continuing to refine my knowledge of new browser APIs. It still feels like a delight to find so many browser APIs being generally supported - I come from an era where most of the Good Stuff just wans’t standard enough. And, on top of it: the little tool is beginning to feel usable.

And that’s about it. Week 343 is a busy one: in Leeds on Thursday for Longridge, and at ATF for the rest of the week.

I kicked off work on Longridge this week, with a remote meeting to go over the shape of the initial work, and some of the approach. That’s given me some grounding, some ideas for a deadline at the end of Week 342, and - most importantly - some homework before a workshop in week 343. That homework lead to some planning, research, and an afternoon of kicking tyres on the internet - amongst other things. I actually need to check what I can say about Longridge - I think I can be reasonably public - so I might describe that more next week.

I spent a day brushing up on the state of web development in 2019. I’m a lapsed front-end developer back from the days when that primarily involved deep knowledge of HTML and awful, awful browsers. (I definitely have built some IE6-compatible sites in my time). Since then, I’ve seen front-end change a lot, and done a nice pile of work on Captionhub with the HTML5 media extensions and spec. But there’s still new things to learn, so I spent an afternoon bringing myself up-to-speed with CSS Grid. Gosh, it’s good, isn’t it? It solves a problem elegantly, and still gives - in many situations - completely acceptable fallbacks when it’s not available. A really elegant API, and a nice bit of technology. I have a small backburner project that I’m using to learn new things on, and I spent some more time on that this week, too; it’s nearly hitting a nice alpha point, so perhaps a concerted day or two in the future will push that over the hill.

It’s nice catching up with technology once it’s a little established. I subscribed hugely to the notion of choosing boring technology. I’ve never been let down by boring technology, and, some days, it’s been reassuring to have my bacon saved by not picking something that goes out of fashion as fast as it came in, or doesn’t have support, or just ended up being the wrong horse. It’s why I still am entirely comfortable shipping Rails projects: it works, it’s expressive for developers, Performant Enough, and gets web-apps based around shipping content to/from databases over HTTP out the door quickly. Uncontroversial. So rather than hurtling to stay up-to-date with trends, I’m comfortable keeping one eye on them, and the other on the Unexciting Present. I’ll read, think, compare, but committing to using them is a very different process. Now that I’m in a lull, it’s time to catch up a little and explore.

I also shipped a few small pieces of code related to things I’ve been doing recently.

Firstly, some Javascript: wxr_to_json is a small command-line node tool for converting Wordpress eXtended Rss to JSON files, simply for ease of processing. It’s a little opinionated - it flattens some one-item arrays into objects - but it works very well for large WXR dumps; v8 and xml2js are very, very quick.

Secondly, some Ruby. I packaged up a gist by Stefan Daschek into a gem to use as a Capistrano plugin. It’s ideal for deploying static sites (including build processes) with cap: it makes a clean local checkout, gives you hooks to run build processes, and then uses rsync to move built content to a server (and lets you use all of cap’s versioned deployment tools). The code worked, but it felt cleaner to turn it into a gem, rather than a lib file floating around my repository. So I finished the bundling job and wrote a pile of documnetation. No idea if either of these will be useful to other people, but they’re easily shared. So let’s do that, then, and perhaps someone else will find them useful. (Why are you using a server and not a CDN for a stic site, you might ask? To avoid yakshaving, primarily. Change one thing at once!)

And that was a week.

A good week! Most visibly, I updated the case studies on this site with lots of new projects over the past three-and-a-half years. Really pleased to have these write-ups done: they illustrate lots of nice angles on my work, and I’m glad to show off Captionhub in detail.

Under the hood, I’ve moved everything over to Hugo and a lot of static files. That’s been a largely delightful process.

I got a little blocked at deployment - I was hoping to move to some kind of CDN-backed deployment, but things were getting a little complex, so I simplified the problem, and just deployed to my existing host.

That involved some neat wrangling of Capistrano. I like cap simply because I use it everywhere, be it for Wordpress (with the composer plugin), Ruby, or static sites. It versions directories, allows for rollbacks, and is a neat layer of glue around ssh.

For this site, I took this sample rsync plugin, and then wrote my own cap tasks so that each deploy checks out the clean site to a temporary folder, runs yarn, runs hugo to build the site, rsyncs that to a server, and finally updates a symlink. It didn’t take long to have that running in my current setup - nice! I might wrap up that rsync plugin into a proper gem next week as nobody seems to have done that yet.

Anyhow, enough about infrastructure.

In new work news, it looks like there’s a writing project - to be known for now as Longridge kicking off next week, and that’ll run in the background for a couple of months. I’ll have more to say on that one in due course, but for now, I scheduled in an early workshop and some onboarding calls.

However, I’m also looking for new projects to run in parallel with that. Ideally, something more technical - prototyping, exploration, or communication and technical consulting. Themes I’m particularly interested in: sound, video, and interaction with those; connected objects and whatever we’re calling “IoT” now; and, perhaps most vitally, tools to empower, enable, and enrich. Work on tools like CaptionHub and instruments like Twinklr and 16n scratches the same itch: giving someone the tool to do work with, to create, and to do things I couldn’t even imagine. I’m interested in continuing to explore that space. get in touch if that sounds like it’s up your street.

I wrapped up the order for Thonk at the beginning of the week when the final parts arrived from China - another excellent job from AllPCB, after some wrangling over my slightly unusual Gerber files. So that was good to get shipped and invoiced.

I also wrapped migrating the Foxfield site to Hugo and Netlify. Whilst I’ve moved a few sites to Netlify now, this was the first Hugo port, so getting things like the RSS feed behaving, and automatic build happening, were good to wrangle on a smaller project than this site.

Speaking of this site, I finally started the big write-up of Selworthy. Unsurprisingly, this took longer than planned - primarily, to find a through-line and plot for describing it, and also to fact-check it. Fortunately, that’s an area where Weeknotes come in handy! I’m going to continue a second pass in week 340, but for now, these are pretty much there.

I had a few phone calls with people I’d been speaking to about a couple of projects. No work really there - so making sure those don’t overrun - but good to consult at early stages if only for half an hour, and perhaps a project may emerge in the nearer term there.

I also spent some time writing some Go. I know, deep down, very, very little Go, but it felt like it might be useful for a script I had an idea for: fast, built-in HTTP library, compiles to a single binary. So I spent half a day writing a script I could probably have written in a hour in Ruby in something new. I greatly enjoyed the process, in the end: the tooling available makes it nicely straightforward, there are good docs, and there was lots to enjoy, such as gofmt everywhere, and slices. A pleasant afternoon feeling competent and productive at code.

I’m making progress on the latest Thonk order, but kitting is taking a little longer than planned, broken up over the course of days, as parts arrive, or inaccuracies in BOMs reveal themselves (notably - when multiple suppliers are involved). So I push forward, doing what I can when I can, and spending the rest of the time on other work.

That other work has included overhauling some of my websites - and where, and how they’re hosted. I’m trying to work out I can offload to simpler hosting setups in order to reduce my workload and responsibilities. That’s included porting a few sites from Wordpress to Hugo and moving to CDN-style hosting, through services such as Netlify.

Of course, by moving to flat files, I’m not locked in to those services: HTML is HTML, and can be hosted almost anywhere. So the work to simplify and strip down actually means I can be confident that should my hosting needs change, hosting them anywhere else is also straightforward.

Hugo’s been really satisfying to work with. I’ve poked at a fair few static site generators in my explorations before settling on this. The decision making came down to a few points:

• I’d love incremental-build (where only dirty changes are compiled) to be working, but even SSGs that say they support it don’t really. So, rather than prioritising incremental build, why not prioritise pure speed? Hugo is very, very fast.
• I like that it’s a compiled Go binary; it works “everywhere”, is easily portable, and doesn’t require huge module dependencies just to run.
• Because it’s precompiled, it doesn’t have a dynamic plugin structure. That may sound limiting. But, in fact, it forces me to do more with ‘just template language’. The Go template language is a bit idiosyncratic, but I like templating languages a lot, and it forces me to think about markup and structure, rather than just bodging everything with dynamic code. I mean, I used to work with Velocity a lot, so I’m used to getting a lot out of limited tools. (I should note - Velocity was… 13 years ago. I’d rather not ever use it again now…)

And, of course, by getting me to reduce content to Markdown and templates, not only is the output easily portable, but the source code is also relatively easily portable - if I ever move away from Hugo, obviously templates will need rebuilding, but the content is in a neat portable format - not tied up inside a database schema that will need exporting.

So that’s been productive, and largely changed my opinion on SSGs for my own personal use.

I greatly enjoyed playing with Ableton’s Learning Synths earlier in the week. Not just because I’m interested in the subject area, either! It made lots of smart pedagogical choices that I really enjoyed, as someone thinking about explanation and education a fair bit:

• before introducing anything technical, start with abstract tools and aesthetic output. In Ableton’s case, that meant: boxes that make noises as you drag around. Things that sound satisfying. Descriptions of things you’ve heard. Supply the learner with context for what you’re about to present.
• only then is it time to start mapping those things to terminology such as pitch or timbre.
• using pitch to illustrate modulation options - envelopes and LFOs - makes it very easy to hear their input. Even though other controls are more common destinations for modulation, starting with pitch makes understanding the metaphor clearer, quicker.
• making all the later examples Just Work with any attached keyboard attached is a superb idea

There’s so much care in the implementation of the project, too, from the delightful animations through to the richness of the tools. And, a common strand with Ableton: note their willingness to promote applicable knowledge, rather than their own tools, in their education work.

Full marks, and ideas I’m sure I’ll keep thinking about.

And that was Week 338.

On Wednesday, I went over to Method. They regularly get outsiders in to give lunchtime talks, and they asked me to deliver something for them. I worked up an edit of “How Computers (Don’t) Think“, a lecture I do for my Hyper Island students around “AI”, Machine Learning, and implementations of it such as computer vision or speech recognition. Of course, as the title suggests, it also dives into the language and manner in which these technologies are communicated, unpacking what Marvin Minsky called suitcase words, to understand that more often than not, we’re talking about counting, arithmetic, or statistics rather than new forms of cognition. (Mike Mallazzo’s recent The BS-Industrial Complex Of Phony AI is a good point of reference on this). On the way, we took in MENACE, Clever Hans, and looked at other futures for AI beyond lazy Skynet metaphors.

Re-editing and prepping that took a moderate amount of time, but the effort was definitely worth it: the talk came out the tightest it’s ever been, and better suited to a design-agency audience. I was particularly pleased to be able to talk to one of Method’s machine-learning experts (of the very much non-bullshit kind) who clarified a few points for me but otherwise was highly enthusiastic about the accuracy and clarity of the talk.

What else?

I spent an afternoon ordering parts and components for a new Foxfield kits run, which also involved a while fettling gerbers and liasing with my Chinese producer; I do some funky things with silkscreening that aren’t always straightforward to produce. That’s all ordered now, so should be coming together in the coming weeks.

I finished my studio move: all the cruft is now tidied away on storage shelves, and my storage boxes have gone. Glad to have all that dealt with.

Beyond that, some good conversations; notably, a pleasant catch-up with Max from After The Flood, about design, strategy, and the various roles that agencies serve for their clients.

I think what I’m doing at the moment is akin to gardening: tending to things that need tending to, spending time in my workspace, going at the pace of things around me. Perhaps that’s a little poetic, but that’s where I am right now: resting and reorienting, spending time on many little things.

I was on holiday until Wednesday, so a short week. I had some really pleasant meetings on Wednesday with a couple of colleagues; one a more generic catch-up about life, work, and process, and the other, a chat with Gabi from Hyper Island about what we might turn our attention to next year. It was great to hear feedback, and exciting to see what might be next - and to start thinking about what topics we might turn to.

Some PCBs cleared customs from China, and so I built up a small personal project, which appears to be working correctly (good) and will get put into place next week.

I worked on a pull request for the monome Ansible documentation (which is not currently live yet). A new mode - a port of Earthsea - is nearly ready to go live in the main branch, and a while back, I worked up some documentation for that. I think documentation’s an important thing, especially for tools and instruments; it’s all too easy for us to work on new features without thinking about explaining them. So whilst scanner darkly worked on the code, I wrote some docs. I spent my flight back from Berlin on Tuesday making a few new images and updating the docs to reflect the latest state of the patch. That got merged in and will go live when the new firmware is completed. A nice community contribution to be able to make in my downtime.

And, to wrap up, I did a quick stocktake to work out what I needed to order for a new run of Foxfield kits. With that out of the way, I can put a few orders into China and get the house in order.

Not much else to report, in a good way. Reading, clearing up, admin, ordering storage for the new studio.

I had a few meetings throughout the week, speaking to somebody about a very early-stage startup, and the role technology might play in it. Nothing very firm right now, but an interesting conversation with an interesting peer, which, right now, is exactly the sort of thing I have time for. Also, a quick conversation about something that may become more concrete in the coming weeks - but it’s at that level of liklihood that doesn’t warrant a codename yet.

I also spent some time on Thursday evening comparing notes with a former colleague about particular aspects of design, and sharing what I’d learned in my career so far around that.

I moved studio this week. I’ve shared with the PAN/Location Games crew for about five years, and they’ve been excellent studio mates and good time. But an opportunity came up for a space perhaps more suited to my freelance needs, so I’m now a couple of doors down - still inside Makerversity - with a small gaggle of freelancers in a shared studio space. It’s a really nice crowd, and I’m hoping it’ll suit my needs and practice well.

Finally, a bit of tinkering with some SAMD51 microcontrollers - the big brother of the SAMD21 chips I’ve been playing with. This are Cortex M4F chips, with floating-point support, and Adafruit have ported the Teensy Audio library to them. So I’ve been tinkering with running some(body else’s) DSP code on them, and seeing if they’ll make a suitable generic bare-chip solution for audio projects… with USB firmware upload, of course.

The project-based work I do always leads to an ebb and flow, and as periods of deep attention end, it’s useful to spend some time in reflection. So I’m not rushing into any new projects too fast. I’m taking a brief breather from client work, working on some personal projects and exploration. I’m collating past project work not just for my website update, but also for my own contemplation - it’s useful to look back on a body of work. And I’m spending some time tinkering with new things, rather than just skimming documentation before I get back to work. Alongside all this: conversations with new people, catching up with peers and old friends. Stocking back up after a period of flow.

A quiet week in the studio, looking to the future, and taking some downtime.

I spent some afternoons writing up a fair few more projects. No, they’re not live on this site yet - there’s one big one to go and then the copy for the new site is largely in place. Next up will be sorting out the infrastructure and deploying it!

As part of that, I added a simple Makefile to the application to handle some basic tasks, and, following Alice’s example wrote a simple make week task to make a new blogpost file with the correct week number. Good!

Otherwise, I spent time meeting colleagues and peers and having a good chats about all manner of topics; good to reset my head, open up some new ideas, think about some new topics, and root myself back in the world. A few tickles of potential work via email, but mainly, a week spent tending the (metaphorical) garden.

Next week: office move, some more meetings, starting to get my head back into work again.

All change!

The work I was doing on Highrigg wrapped up. Between weeks 332 and 333, I wrapped up my end-to-end demo, with a fully working backend, front-end authentication, and some basic live updates. As well as the text documentation, I recorded a quick screencast of the demo in operation - that’d make it easy to share with colleagues who couldn’t run the software on their setups.

And with the alpha goal hit, my contract came to an end. So I’m taking a bit of a breath, and wondering what’s next. For now, that involves wrapping up a variety of small personal pieces of work - notably, an up-to-date version of this website with several years’ worth of projects written up!

I’m also moving studio. Not very far - a new space has come up at Makerversity, so, after several years sharing with current studiomates, I’ll be moving a few doors down into a small space with some freelancers I know. It suits my needs well right now, and will be a lovely bunch to share a space with. Many thanks to Ben, Sam, and the rest of the PAN/Location Games crews for the past five years.

I also had a prospective meeting about a small workshop which sounds positive, so I’m working out how best to fit that in around studio change-around and some upcoming travel.

And, of course, this all means that I potentially have upcoming availability. If the sort of thing I do - technology strategy, prototyping engineering, interaction design - sounds like a fit for you, now’s a good time to get in touch!

A short week, owing to a bank holiday at the beginning and a day largely not working at the end.

Over at Highrigg, I worked on the spec from last week, getting something closer to a list of things to be achieved, as well as making it easier to specify what other assistance we’d require. I met with some colleagues to share that and understand how best to secure that assistance.

I also had some technical successes: fleshing out my GraphQL service backend and, after some assistance spinning up some Google Cloud services, rewriting a service to store files there (rather than locally) and auto-update them. All the yarn tasks to do that are all completed - now I just need to set up whatever the equivalent of a cron job is to run it. And, on another piece of work, I deployed some updates around error logging. Finally, we reviewed some colleagues’ excellent UX research around some changes we were proposing, and gained useful insight into both those changes, and wider issues effecting a particular slice of end-users. A productive couple of days!

On Thursday and Friday, I reached feature-parity on my port of this site to Hugo, and also managed to port all the legacy content over, I think. So at some point, I’ll consider swapping over, and possibly refining the appropriate rsync incantation. But I’d also like to spend some time writing up all the projects that have happened since Rubato, if only to see if this new platform works a little better.

Anyhow, a good few days.

Highrigg continued: a series of meetings with partners, an excellent lunchtime lecture and discussion, and more programming.

After a day spent wiring the backend I started putting together last week with the front-end, I ended up with a shell of an application, and at least one screen with real live data. Which was the time to hit the pause button. Why? Well, I was beginning to tip over from learning (about the project) and into production, and it’s not quite the right time for that yet. What I was learning was that it was probably not a one-person job, and it’d go a lot faster with a more experienced React engineer focusing on the client implementation. I was also learning what pace of work would be like on it, and already gaining some confirmation that the architecture I’d settled on was sensible. I was also exposing some of the requirements not captured in our initial documents - for instance, approaches to live updates and data push - that only became more obvious as I began implementing. So that’s something to turn into specification in Week 331.

In the rest of the week, I spent some time exploring updating this website. I’m aware that there’s a long backlog of projects to write-up (especially Selworthy), and I’d like to make it easier to do that. At the same time, I also think I could probably move to something like a static site generator, if only I could find one I could settle on. That’s some work, but would then mean that all my content exists as files, and is relatively easy to port to other platforms in future.

I settled on Hugo. I’ve used it on another project, it’s remarkably fast, and whilst its compiled nature means a lot of implementation comes down to template tricks… it also means it’s not the ‘piece of string’ that Javascript-based engines can be. A solid day and a bit of coding got me to an end-to-end implementation of this site, with all the blogposts up and running, and most of the work done to start importing project pages. When they’re done, it’ll be time to consider making the switch, and also seeing how easy it is to write up new projects. But I’m hoping it’ll be reasonably straightforward. Also: pleasant to work on a new, greenfield project.

A four-day week after the bank holiday.

Two days at Highrigg. Last week, I was forcing myself into a deep dive on in React, building a prototype front-end that talked to a third-party API. This week, I decided it was worth introducing our own server-side API between us and the third-party.

This decision - which my colleague Lachie helped me come to, in a highly useful brief rubberducking session - came about for a few reasons. Firstly, so we could separate some responsibility, and make the front-end code a bit less brittle. It also meant that if we wanted to start using other service - notably, some internal data-sources - rather than making growing number of calls on the front-end, we could keep front-end calls down and instead combine all the data from multiple server-side calls into a single payload. That also means we can take a little bit of responsibility for caching in the right place - the server-side.

With that decision made, I wanted to write just enough code to confirm that I’d picked appropriate tools, as well as architecture. I began exploring building a small GraphQL service. GraphQL is very trendy right now, but it feels like an appropriate fit. I’m making something resembling a small mobile app, and being able to serve up all the data for a ‘page’ or ‘view’ in a single lump is ideal. My data model is also fairly hierarchical, and largely read-only, which made life simple.

Unlike last week’s battles with React, this work went more smoothly, and it turns out that I don’t just like the idea of GraphQL, I also really like the implementation. By the end of the second day, I had the beginnings of a service shelled out. More to the point, I’d done enough to decide that this felt like a viable technology to use for the project going forward. I finished up my technical review documents with this knowledge, and updated some architecture diagrams.

On Thursday and Friday, I finished bagging up a run of Foxfield kits for Thonk, and spent some time in the workshop - firstly, starting to brush up some woodwork skills, and secondly, building up an electronics prototype. This second electronics prototype was another SAMD21-based build, which I’ll probably write up, to share my approach for building these boards. It worked first time - and also confirmed that a new footprint was highly viable for what I wanted to do with it.

Lots of meetings at Highrigg, across a range of projects; some good time thinking through design interactions with colleagues, and then, around that, spelunking an API I’m coding against.

At the same time, forcing my brain through the React mincer possibly faster than is ideal. I am finding getting up-to-speed with React challenging, and often end up frustrated.

Learning new things is hard, yes, and it’s of course sometimes the work of a technologist to stay up-to-date. What I’m finding hard is the gulf between the basic tutorials and guide (which I’ve completed and re-read a few times) and the real-world project I have to operate in. I know this means I haven’t fully internalised the information - going from knowing to knowing - but it’s a while since I’ve felt like this. It doesn’t help that it feels like something I ought to have some faculty with, as a former front-end developer.

Why am I putting myself through this? Because I think it’s important even if I’m spelunking or prototyping to work in the platform other colleagues are most familiar with, and inside a React+Typescript shop, I think it’s reasonable to work with those. (They also, lack of familiarity aside, seem like highly reasonably technology choices). There’s real internal value to playing ball, especially in a larger organisation, and so a balance between ‘output from prototyping’ and ‘lasting value of prototype’ needs to be trod.

We’ll get there. But a frustrating few hours trying to achieve things I know I could do in other platforms or languages, and resisting the urge to chuck in the towel.

On Thursday, I found that Fedex had failed to deliver parts for a Foxfield run, so delayed that until next week. I spent some time in CAD and lasercutting, wrapping up a prototype panel, and then finishing the electronics of the prototype I’ve been working on. This went well: my workflow from panel to cutter is much tighter now, and a single iteration got things spot on. The prototype is working well, too. Time to make a decision about that prototype soon.

And then, a long weekend. Back Tuesday for a four-day week 329.

Highrigg continued. There’s not a lot I can really say easily in public about my work there; suffice to say, an amount of prodding at code, exploring APIs, discussing interactions with colleagues, and drawing up a technical overview of a future product.

On my couple of days in the studio, I made good headway with the electronics project I was working on in Week 325. I managed to get a better understanding of flashing the device over SWD - and managed to do it with a BlackMagic Probe, which is a more affordable, open-source alternative to the full JLink (though the Segger tools are excellent). By the end of Thursday, I could program the bootloader and application code via gdb. I also finished porting the code over, and discovered the board worked entirely correctly. A few pin alterations in the firmware, and it looked like it was end-to-end working. I spent a little while thinking what programmer or test boards might look for it, and ordered some material to laser-cut a front-panel in week 328.

Broadly, though, I’m quite excited, as the whole SAMD21 unit can be placed into other projects in future relatively easily.

On Friday, I started working up an order for Thonk of some Foxfield products. That entailed a quick stocktake, work out what I already had lying around, and then ordering parts from Mouser and a few runs of PCBs from China. I also stuck on a new prototype to test some EAGLE part layouts I was playing with, potentially as a future revision to 16n.

I also had some nice meetings this week. On Thursday, I had an excellent chat with Ben Pawle from Nord. Ben and I discovered we were both teaching on the same Hyper Island course, so he suggested catching up - last time we’d spoken was at an IoT Coffee Morning that Matt Webb ran. It was great to talk to another practitioner; we talked about design practice, and making bots, and balancing own work with client work, and it was good to be reminded I’m not the only person doing this.

I also spent some time with a colleague at Makerversity who’d initially asked for some assistance with ESP8266 - but we ended up having a deep dive on designing the connected component of IOT products, and it was good to be able to share some experience across that shape of product design. Namely, I ended up recommending against technical complexity too early in the process, and instead we looked at doing the bare minimum to get to end-to-end - and to find out what making a product connected felt like. By doing that, you get to discover surprises on the way sooner, rather than engineering to spec and not leaving space for serendipity.

On holiday. No weeknotes! Back for week 327.