Week 143

Aloha, it’s me again, Chris (that’s my picture over in the corner, although I’ve got better hair than that now). The Goddess of Harmony has once again chosen me to write of our exploits on this, the 143rd week of Go Free Range. I’ve got a strict time limit to get this done as I’m off to get a bit of sun in Fuerteventura later today. I’m also hoping that it’s not the most boring post that’s ever been written which, according to my “friend” Eliot, I managed to achieve with last weeks effort.

Anyways, on with the good stuff.

Jase has been away all week on a throwing course in St Ives. I can’t even being to imagine how far he’s going to be able to throw stuff now - he was pretty good before he went.

Last weeks decision to buy computers and telephones through the company came in handy after I dropped, and destroyed, my old HTC on the way to work. Needless to say I was pretty excited to take delivery of my shiny new iPhone+ toward the end of the week.

The four of us left at GDS got a little workout on Monday when we moved to a different office and had to dismantle the little cubicle farm so that we could all sit together (awwh, isn’t that sweet).

James and Tom headed over to LRUG’s Battleship: Ruby Fight Club event after work on Monday. I think Tom’s pretty convinced he would’ve won had he not been delayed talking to the ISP in our new office (a somewhat lame excuse if you ask me).

Thursday saw us on a team building afternoon with Pete and Neil. We chose a lovely little pub as the location to eat, drink and talk about Neil’s desire to vejazzle the site (I’m not sure what the site’s got to do with Vespas but I can’t wait to find out.) Silliness aside for a second, we do want to make the publishing aspect of the site as simple and intuitive as possible: it’s going to be used by people familiar with a variety of existing systems and we need to ensure the transition is as smooth as possible. With silliness firmly switched back on we also discussed the David Icke flag that would allow you to see the government in all their reptilian glory. We almost certainly won’t do this :-).

Tom was away at Magrails in Manchester on Friday. He normally writes copious amounts of notes at the conferences he attends so I’m sure we’ll all be able to read a full report next week, eh Tom?

Friday also saw the end of sprint two of our work on GDS. We ended with Neil demoing the product to a pretty big audience of other developers, editors and some other government folks that I’m not familiar with. It’s great having Neil run these end of sprint demos as it allows us to see how he thinks about and uses the product.

Aside from all that we have had at least a couple of interesting conversations about our testing approach and specifically our use of Cucumber. It’s fair to say that these conversations can be quite hard but I definitely think they’re useful in helping us find a consistent approach. We’ve probably got the beginnings of something that we can start writing about, but that’ll definitely have to wait for another day.

And I reckon that’ll just about do for this week. I’m off to get some last minute practice of saying “dos cervezas por favor” before jetting off. Have good weekends and weeks everybody peeps.