Posts tagged as weeknotes (page 9)

Week 123 was really short owing to holidays and family events. Still, a few significant things happened!

We started recording on Periton this week; one session in Week 123, with the majority of Week 124 also going to be spent on recording. A decent start, though, and I’m hoping I’m going to relax more into it as we do more sessions and interviews.

I helped Richard confirm Rubato was in shape for next week’s gig: Richard’s playing at the Apple Store on Regent Street, London, the evening of 24th February. Do come along if you’d like to see Rubato in action, and to hear some fantastic music!

And finally, over at my own personal site, I wrote a bit about connected objects. Or rather: I wrote about a passage in Philip K Dick’s Ubik that’s been doing the rounds, and tried to unpack the relationship between connected objects and the financial structures they’re made within:

Joe Chip clearly lives in a connected future. We know his homeopape machine talks to some kind of network, requesting news in a particular tone and fabricating it for him.

We know that the devices that make up his conapt know about his credit rating, and hence can refuse to work without either a line of credit or cash money.

The question really is: why does the apartment and its devices know about his credit rating? Why should it matter?

More, about capitalism, the internet of things, and some Bruno Latour, over at infovore.org.

That’s it for Week 123; as I write, I’m on the East Coast mainline to kick off recording for Periton in week 124. More about that next week.

Quick weeknotes for a short week:

• Periton moves ahead, with some planning, research, and wrestling with booking travel. Plans are coming together, and real work starts next week.
• One last bugfix on Rubato/Burton – an issue around Internet Explorer’s handling of negative margin. I seem to have spent about ten years of my professional life wrestling with Internet Explorer’s esoteric handling of the CSS spec, and that doesn’t look like it’s changing any time soon. As ever, Browserstack proved itself invaluable.
• Continued tinkering with Elasticsearch. I’m playing around with it on a few little experiments, following my experience of it on Swarmize. I’m continuing to learn things: the best way to map and structure data to support aggregation, the simplest way to spit data out. It’s a tool I’m finding increasingly valuable not as a search tool, but a data exploration tool.
• Continued pipeline work: not super-aggressive, but a few new leads on potential small projects upcoming.

Week 123 will be short as well: family events and long weekends taking up a few of the days.

Week 121 saw the launch (or first performance) of Rubato, in Richard’s gig at St John’s on Bethnal Green.

I inevitably find live events nervewracking; there’s so much that’s out of your hands. Perhaps I protest too much – by the time we had the gig, my work was done, while Richard still had to perform eight songs. It all went very well: everything worked fine over 3G/4G data, on a very wide range of devices – but more to the point, the experience came out wonderfully. It was a great venue, and the intimate stories, told through a very personal device whilst the church filled with Richard’s guitar and the string quartet was remarkably atmospheric. We had loads of positive feedback from the audience; many of them found it very powerful. It all managed to deliver what we hoped it might, and I think Richard was very pleased. He’s performing again with Rubato at the Apple Store on Regent Street on the 24th of February, so do come if you’d like.

Periton moves ahead apace; I spent Wednesday having a great chat and discussion with the researcher/producer on it, and we’ve begun to line up interviews already; I’m also beginning to think about how I prepare for it, because it’s not a kind of work I’m very used to.

I had a few meetings with a team at Good, Form and Spectacle, discussing our pitch for NESTA’s Cultural Open Data Challenge. I think the pitch we came too was good – now we’ll just have to see how the whole thing pans out.

And, to cap it all, there were some leads on a few projects, and one short piece of work for next week, all of which keeps the pipeline flowing a little, so the January nerves are beginning to abate a little. Good; onwards.

Various good meetings this week:

• A kick-off meeting on Periton, brainstorming ideas and working out angles for the thing; also getting to know the producer, and understanding making something of a shape I’ve never really done before.
• A lunch and a catch up with Marie, who’s Digital Design Curator at the V&A.
• A trip to the Hardware-ish Coffee Morning, which was smaller than the last time, but a bunch of good chat and ideas that rattled around my head for hours later.

I also finished up the final few fixes to Rubato/Burton in advance of its premier in Week 121. Which reminds me: I never linked Richard’s second video of the project in progress. In this case, a test of the whole thing with as many devices as he could muster:

By the end of the week, I was as confident as I ever get about live projects: it all worked under all manner of constraints, and Richard was comfortable performing with it. On the 3rd, we’d see how it turned out.

Rubato/Burton is really beginning to come into land now. Richard’s worked on a lot of the content, and in doing so, found all manner of edge cases for me to pore over. It’s been super-helpful in terms of understanding expected behaviour, and what a performer might need from it. So I fixed up a lot of those issues, spent some time making the performance controls much more obvious for a musician on stage, and tidied a lot of the code up, giving it structure and removing dependencies. That gives me a bit more confidence about it.

On Thursday, a brainstorming meeting about a potential piece of work – and meeting a few new super-interesting people.

On Wednesday lunchtime, I caught up with Basil, whose studio is just around the corner. It was a good chat: he’s heavy into focusing on Telescope, and we discussed the tug of project work versus focusing on other clients. I came away impressed with their focus, but also reminded that much of what work feels or looks like isn’t always unique. And it’s good to connect with colleagues outside the studio – if only to get a new perspective on my own practice.

And I finally gave Swarmize a project page. Swarmize was one of my favourite pieces of work from last year: from a greenfield start to a fully-functional alpha, building both UI and back-end, iterated on as part of a small team and working closely with end-users. And, underneath it all, wrangling big chunks of data. If that sort of shape project – from invention through prototyping and iteration – is something you’re interested in, or think you have on the horizon, do get in touch – there might be interesting work to do together.

Two weeks in one – last week had enough blogposts, what with launching the V&A Spelunker, the first public post about Rubato, and my yearnotes – so I thought I’d save any other news for this week.

Week 117 was spent getting the Spelunker, a project with George Oates at Good, Form & Spectacle, into the world. George wrote more about the project at the V&A site, and I wrote a little on Sketching and Engineering over at the GF&S Work Diary:

Early on in the process of making the V&A Spelunker – almost a few hours in – I said to George something along the lines of “I’m really trying to focus on sketching and not engineering right now“. We ended up discussing that comment at some length, and it’s sat with me throughout the project. And it’s what I wanted to think about a little now that the Spelunker is live.

More here.

Rubato is the project I’m working on with Richard Birkin, and I wrote about the first public material to come out of it here. After getting that post into the world, Richard ran a more intensive test with many devices over the weekend, which helped feed into the work for Week 118. The good news is that the code turned out to be surprisingly robust. That meant that my week was more focused on improvements and streamlining, rather than bugfixing, and I was able to be more responsive to Richard.

I spent a day or two in week 117 overhauling infovore.org, my personal site, and updating some of the front-end practice on it. It’s now both more legible and built a bit better, which made me happy.

I also took the opportunity to write up a piece of design I did about seven years ago, all about encouraging users to understand that their list of subscriptions is ephemeral. It came up in conversation at the hardware-ish coffee morning I attended on Thursday of week 118.

And finally, a good bit of news on a relatively unusual piece of work for me, provisional coded Periton: it looks like it’s going ahead. A few little days in February and March, from the sounds of things. Will keep you posted!

Back in the saddle, then – and still firming up work commitments for the beginning of the year, so do get in touch if you have what you think might be a Tom-shaped hole, be it prototyping, development, or bashing heads about design.

I was out of the studio for Christmas and New Year these weeks; doesn’t really seem worth recording, but otherwise my weeknote counting gets out of sync. And so, I’m logging them for completeness’ sake. More news to come soon!

As expected, the final couple of weeks of the year were pretty quiet.

I continued work on Milkhill for a couple of days, which wasn’t as long as planned, but enough to move all the movement in it over to a physics engine, and also add some “bases” for players to capture. This addition – along with some alterations to the player avatars – involved wrapping my head around Unity’s in-built animation system (which, it turns out, is state machines all the way down). Christopher LaPollo’s 2D tutorials were about the clearest, most concise explanation I found on the matter, which helped massively. It also helped that they were text, not video. There are a lot of Unity tutorials out there that are video-only, which is a real pain when you just want to skim something to ascertain if it’s what you’re interested in; Kudos for Christopher for doing all the typing.

I spent one lunchtime at the second meeting of XYZW Club, in which Ben walked us through adding light-sources and Gouraud shading to our simple toy renderer – an awful lot added pretty quickly. The conversation to wrap up the meeting – slightly boggling at how far we’d leapt in that single session – was really interesting.

On Friday 12th, I talked about building data-driven visualisations and products for MySociety: as I’d hoped, the discussion afterwards from the audience was really interesting and pertinent – everything from how to initiate and explore data-products through to the legalities of licensing data. It’s always nice when there’s a healthy, buzzy discussion, and lots of experience in the room for people to share (rather than just me rabbitting away). I also think that talk is pretty much retired now, so I should probably write it up in the new year.

In week 114, I worked a little on Leithhill, a small database exploration tool wrapped around a research database – this had been on the backburner a little, and a day or two with the data model suddenly pulled it forward into something really useful. There’ll likely be a little more to do on that in the new year.

Needless to say, there were meetings and conversations: I’m still trying to work out what next year looks like, work-wise, and I have a lot of availability (and various ‘maybes’ floating around). So if you’re interested in working together next year, do get in touch.

And really, along with a little admin, that was it. A quiet end to 2014. I’m out of the studio until the new year, when the job of getting 2015 under way in earnest really kicks off. See you then.

The weeks before Christmas are somewhat fragmented: a few small projects, lots of meetings, a few personal projects, hunting for future projects.

Rubato/Burton hit its first main milestone for me: end-to-end demo. The one feature I wanted to write in this week was being able to pick up the playback halfway: if you turn up late to the show, or click on the page late, you shouldn’t be stuck out of sync with other viewers, or unable to watch. Implementing this was about the fiddliest thing so far, but a day or two saw it through, and I was able to ship it to Richard early in the week.

I had a few meetings throughout the week, some about potential projects, and also stopped by Matt Webb’s hardware coffee morning to meet a few folks and chatter about objects, electronics, and small business. Really, I went to listen; I’m not quite in the place many folks are in, but fascinating to see and hear both what people are up to and how they approach it.

I got the prototype I’d worked on with George deployed this week, after a few hours thrashing out some join tables in a database to speed the whole thing up.

I also spent a day tinkering on what was to be my ‘end of term’ project – albeit a bit late. I’m finally working on a game prototype I meant to start about a year ago; personal work is always hard to make time for, but I work at doing so.

Milkhill – definitely not its real name – is a top-down arcade game for two players, to be played in the same room – local multiplayer, as it were. Beyond that, I can’t say much more, because I’ve learned enough about designing games to know that most of my ideas will probably go out the window pretty fast.

So rather than going in with big ideas, I’m going in with tiny ambitions: really embracing shoshin. I’ve not made a real-time game before, so this is a project to explore that and learn some Unity beyond tiny toys. My starting point for this week is: it’s got to be fun to move the avatars around the world. If the movement isn’t fun, I don’t think the game’s going to be fun regardless of what the other rules are.

I’ve spent a day on it so far. In that time, I built some very simple vector art in Sketch, and then started writing code to manoeuvre it around the screen: left stick to move, right stick to aim, like in Geometry Wars or other ‘twin-stick’ arcade shooters. A few hours of wrestling in C# with dead-zones, vectors, and quaternions, and I’d achieved that goal.

The sticks worked, but it wasn’t that much fun. I thought adding momentum might take quite a while, but moving everything over to Unity’s 2D physics wasn’t nearly as bad as I expected, and only took about twenty minutes for the first pass. I fiddled a lot with forces and drag, but all of sudden, the little pentagonal tank in the above video hurtled and skidded, it required just enough subtelty to control, but it felt like it was more alive in the world. A huge improvement. Hopefully I’ll get a few more days to tinker with this in the run up to Christmas. A long-ish write-up, but it’s nice to write about process and labour, rather than just meetings I had!

Week 111 saw lots of progress on Rubato/Burton. I spent the majority of my time, head town, working through one feature at once.

A lot of the project began from refactoring other people’s code: making the new interactions work with existing data and templates, and then changing the data formats once I realised what I was going to need. As a result, it’s been hard to see the ‘big picture’. I keep having to work through a single feature, get to the end, then come up for air and work out what’s next.

Fortunately, that’s been working well as a process: the number of steps is clear, and I haven’t had to retrace them very often. I’m making the path by walking, essentially. Richard was passing through London on Friday, so he came over to the studio and we worked together a bit – had a chat, and got the code up and running on his laptop.

Before he left, I managed a demo of using the footpedal to advance through steps in a song, with synchronised animation playing out on other screens, and then advancing to a different song using the pedal as well – and the song swapping out on all screens. Which is nearly an end-to-end demo: there’s one big feature left for week 112.

I say this a lot: sometimes it’s hard to see that end goal when I’m in the middle of a particularly hard feature. But the process appears to have worked, and it was great to get to an endpoint at the end of the week.

Otherwise, a few other small issues with another project led to some time spent normalizing somebody else’s messy data, and there were a couple of meetings. I also attended the first meeting of XYZW Club which was really interesting, and some of it even sunk in: I’d upgraded our point renderer to flat triangles shortly after the session.

Week 110, and as I returned to GMT, I returned to work.

For a couple of days this week, I worked with George Oates of Good, Form & Spectacle on spelunking a large-ish cultural dataset. The goal was to see what we could prototype in a short period of work – see what was within the data – and also to see what it’d be like working together. It was a fun few days, and we got to an interesting place: a single, interesting interactive visualisation, alongside some broader ‘faceted’ views of the dataset to help us explore it. A nice piece of work, and fun teamwork.

I also kicked off Rubato/Burton, a collaboration with Richard Birkin on building a synchronized visualiser for music, funded by Sound and Music. Richard’s great fun to work with, and the first couple of days on it made great foundations. Firstly, I started writing the foundations of the backend in Node and socket.io; then, porting Richard’s initial work and visualisations over to it.

We had a good early prototype by the end of the week, although one that was going to need considerable iteration in week 111 to support many different songs, and changing songs in a set. Rubato’s the sort of project that requires me to just move one step at a time, though, completing a phase before iterating on it, and so it felt like a good starting point.

I also built Richard a foot controller for it: a couple of momentary footswitches hooked up to a Teensy pretending to be a HID controller. I spent a pleasant morning in the workshop, soldering, drilling, writing some C and packaging this in an aluminium housing, and filmed the lot as part of our documentation.

And, alongside all the code, and design, there was also admin to be done: finalising the 2013-2014 tax return with my accountant.

I’ve got enough to be working on to the end of the calendar year, but I’m looking for work from January 2015. So if you’re interested in working together, or have a project that you think might be a good fit for me, drop me a line. Things I’m particularly interested in: exploring and visualising data; communicating data that through interaction design; projects at early stages that need a prototype, or alpha, or their ideas exploring; connected objects. The sort objects described in weeknotes and projects should give you an idea. And if you’re not sure – why not ask anyway?

Weeks 107-109 were spent in Australia.

Firstly, at Web Directions South, delivering a talk about Connected Objects (specifically, how to think about designing them, how to learn lessons from them in the design of other things, and how to consider them as more than just objects for individual consumers to own). I think it went well; it’s probably the final refinement of a talk I’ve been iterating on the past year. I hope to get a transcript up of it before the year’s out, and there should also be a video to come.

Then, I took a vacation, because once you’re on the other side of the world, it seems churlish to head back after four days. That was pretty good. I returned in the middle of week 109, and spent the rest of it waiting for my bodyclock to return, too.

A busy couple of weeks. These were the last two weeks in the run up to the delivery of the alpha of Swarmize. That meant lots and lots of small things – all the things you tend to remember in the final few weeks.

Firstly, completing and polishing the documentation. This wasn’t a last-minute thing: it’s been something I spent a while on. As well as some decent enough READMEs throughout the git repository – enough to help other Guardian developers – I also focused on delivering a set of case studies.

You can view them all on the Swarmize site. They cover basic usage and form embedding, advanced-usage (with the storage and retrieval APIs), and a real-world case study. I’m particularly pleased with the use of animated GIFs to explain interactive process – not endless instructions on how to perform a mouse gesture, nor a slow video with interminable narration. I think they’re a really useful fit for documentation.

I tested the API which, after I’d sketched it in Ruby, Graham built a more robust version of in Scala – and removed a few wonky features. That all went pretty smoothly. I also spent a while testing the embeddable forms in a variety of browsers, and learning a lot about <a href="https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window.postMessage">postMessage</a> as a result of trying to build a smoother experience in mobile browsers.

A few new features also snuck their way in. Dangerous, at the last minute, but they were relatively straightforward to implement and definitely turned out to be worthwhile additions.

And, of course, we spent some time at the Guardian offices demoing it and explaining it. We also got a particularly nice write-up and interview on journalism.co.uk.

I’m hoping to write up my own project page on Swarmize shortly, which will touch a bit more on the process and my involvement (as well as providing a clearer answer than these weeknotes to What It Is).

Some good news regarding Burton: it got some funding. Not a vast amount, but enough to achieve what Richard and I would like to – so that’s going to be a focus before the end of the year. Really looking forward to it.

And, finally, I spent a good while working on my talk for Web Directions South. I think that’s all come together reasonably well. Some of these Things are not like the others is an expansion of “A Lamppost Is A Thing Too“, and covers Hello Lamppost, Columba, and various thinking about designing connected objects and services, expanded into a longer, more wide-ranging 45 minute session.

I hope it goes down well. I’ll no doubt have more to say in week 107 – which is going to be spent in Australia.

Week 103 was, I think, a rather good week.

Swarmize/Abberley is moving into its final month before hitting Alpha. The last piece of the puzzle is some kind of API to extract data from the system. We can already put data in, and we’ve got the tools to download and explore it, but what we really need now is a way for developers to extract data programatically: a retrieval API. One we’ve got that, the whole end-to-end process is sketched out.

To that end, I started sketching out an API as a tiny Sinatra application, that Graham will hopefully port to Scala shortly. Within a day or so of work, I had a simple API that allowed exploring of results, overviews of field counts, as well as outputting GeoJSON FeatureCollections given an appropriate location field to pivot around. I’ve started calling this type of code spelunking: diving into a thing to see how it feels, to learn by doing, and trip over myself soon enough that I understand the real demands of the system.

I also sketched out several example applications in flat HTML and node.js-backed client-server apps to illustrate how the API could be used. It’s not enough to just write that code, though: it also needs to be documented. A lot of the week was spent writing clear, concise API documentation, and I’m going to be tidying up all the documentation over the coming weeks. We’re really focusing on everything that will help The Guardian use Swarmize in anger once the alpha is complete.

Pitches for funding for Burton have gone in. I sat down with Richard, who was passing through London on Monday, and talked over various ideas, which were all exciting and productive, and so we hammered some things out in Google Docs – or, at least, Richard hammered most of it out and I offered input where appropriate. Crossing fingers there, but I think we’ll find a way to do something.

And on Friday morning, I brought the film producers I’m mentoring into the studio to sit down and do some drawing. Not a lot, I’ll admit, but it was good to just start showing the process of using your hands to think with and to slow yourself down – forcing you to reason with how much you can fit on a screen, and precisely what needs to be present for a user to interact with. It was useful, and I’m looking forward to seeing how it’s shaped their thinking next week.

Back to work after a week off.

That meant diving hard into Abberley/Swarmize. We’d run a test of it around the Scottish Independence Referendum, and now I was working out how to re-implement various features so they’d hold up under the strain of a 90k+ dataset; something that Swarmize is likely to have to deal with.

This meant lots of back and forth, but by Friday night, I’d sussed out how to deliver very large CSV files efficiently – and cache them on Cloudfront for the majority of users.

I also overhauled lots of the real-time updates in the app. These are still fairly straightforward: fundamentally, it’s a traditional HTML-based application, but it’s useful for editors to have live updates.

My homegrown caching routines got thrown out in favour of properly implementing a Backbone-based solution. Backbone has always made conceptual sense, but I’ve never seen a way to implement it into my own work. Thanks to a really useful chat with Nat, something large in my head clicked and I finally saw how to use it in a way I was comfortable with. This led to a big rewrite, and now various graphs and tables are updating themselves in a sensible, sane way.

Other work on it this week: spending some time with Graham overhauling our deployment routines, so rather than reduplicating code, we have a single deploy script that (through configuration) can deploy any component; lots of fixes to code and infrastructure.

The flexibility and general scope of my work on Swarmize has been great, but there are times when it makes me feel pulled in a variety of directions – and right now, that’s hitting a little hard. Fortunately, I ended the week with a long chat with Matt, who’s sponsoring the project, and he helped shape what the next four weeks – to Alpha – looks like in my head. That’s helped set a brief for what we’re doing, and I’m looking forward to writing some burndown lists.

Thursday saw my regular mentoring session for CreateInnovate, where we moved some ideas forward, but it became clear that week 3 would be spent with some pens, drawing: getting thinking out of the head and onto paper, to make it clearer.

I also spent a few hours this week sketching, thinking, and prodding the feasibility of a potential new pitch with a friend I’ve wanted to work with for a while. It feels strong enough that it’s got a codename – Burton – and I’m hoping we’ll find a way to bring it into the world before the year’s out.

Holidays are important: they’re important for the head and the heart, and they also tend to make my work better when I return. Week 101 was spent on a proper holiday, in the South of France: no conferences at the beginning or end, no clients prior to work. Just a full week devoted to being on holiday. It was very restorative. Normal service resumes in week 102.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So what’s happened in those weeks?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m sat in the Hubbub studio in Utrecht. I’ve been visiting for a few days, and on my final morning, thought I’d catch up with Kars, and borrow a desk to catch up on some email. It’s lovely. A pleasant, cool space with excellent light, and Vechtclub XL (the co-working/studio environment Kars’ studio is part of) is wonderful: lots of makers, craftsfolk, and designers under some very big roofs. I’m a little jealous.

Week 95 was short. I spent it in Newcastle, running a three day workshop for CreateInnovate with David Varela. In that time, we took four pairs of filmmakers through a crash-course in what’s described as ‘cross-media’. I focused on technology and procedural work; David spoke a lot about writing and story, and we both neatly intersected around narrative and games.

It was a busy, exciting three days. We managed to cram a lot in, thanks in particular to some diverse guest speakers Skyping in on Monday afternoon, and thanks also to the enthusiasm of the participants. It’s always exciting to go on a journey with new people, because you never quite know where you’ll end up – and I certainly left with many new ideas, not to mention a broader window onto Film. And, of course, it was a delight to work formally with David for the first time.

The rest of the week was spent out of the studio, visiting friends in Utrecht, and how I come to be in Kars’ studio. Back in the UK, at the Guardian, on the Tuesday of week 96 – and then it all begins again.

Another week cranking hard on Lewesdon.

Graham, the other developer on the project, is on a well-earned holiday, so I’ve had two weeks to push the website that most people are going to utilise and experience quite far forward. It’s very much a working wireframe, extending Bootstrap just enough to do what we want, and to understand the pathways through the site. I’m also off the project during week 95, so I was aiming to leave it in a state where he’d be able to pick things up on his end of things – the Scala tools that are going to do some of the crunchier, high performance work.

This week, that meant adding things like authentication – so that Guardian users can log in with their own accounts – and making sure the alpha UI is coherent and functional. I also took some time to write quite a lot of tests, getting the ball rolling for me writing more in future, and also to cover a complex set of functionality: setting the “open” and “close” timestamps for “swarms”, our large-scale surveys. A useful exercise, and it immediately lifted my confidence in my code.

By the end of the week, much of the deck we’d been using to explain the site had been replaced by functioning code: just in time for a demo with the Editor. He was enthusiastic and asked useful, pertinent questions, which we’ve added to the list of editorial feedback. In a couple of weeks, we’ll be showing the work so far to everyone who’s offered us tips.

For the rest of the week, I was prepping for Week 95’s workshop: one large talk and one small to write, along with making sure we had a working timetable. By Friday, I had a decent schedule spreadsheeted up and shared with my collaborators, and a decent draft of my talk about digital media. Come Sunday, I’d be on a train to Newcastle.