Week 147

Good afternoon on this very fine late Summer day. The notes are a little late coming (again) so apologies for that (again).

We kicked off last week in our own office, in order to give time for the dust to settle in Aviation House (the new home of GDS). It sounded like the dust had settled by around Wednesday and so we started sharing our time between Worship Street and Aviation House. The new building’s pretty good; a little bouncy due to the suspended floors and occasionally a little noisy, but generally a big, light, open area of hotdesking goodness (you can find us on the first desks as you walk in).

When we took on the Worship Street property we agreed to take on everything that was left within it, which amounted to a few desks, chairs and other officey things you might expect. James A had already spent quite some time removing the drawers from underneath the good desks and had moved everything that we weren’t going to use into one corner of the office. Although it was tucked out the way (at just under 1000 square feet, the office is plenty big enough for five of us) it was great to have it picked up by Hackney Council on Wednesday. It’s doubly great because they take it away for recycling rather than it just going in a landfill. As always Jase was willing to get stuck right in with the furniture dismantling.

James A spent Wednesday morning at the Ruby Business meetup where he chatted about company insurance and cucumber (it sounds as though we’ve independently come to some similar conclusions as Chris Parsons), met a fan of #blue and was surprised to discover that people still don’t 100% get that we’re all GFR co-owners and all share the business stuff as well as development.

The end of GFR week 147 brought with it the end of sprint 4 of our Govuk (I like to think this is pronounced like Southwark) work. The end of the week also saw our free Pivotal Tracker plan come to an end. In the spirit of openness, rather than pay to keep it closed, it’s now been converted to a public project. I think this is a great thing to do and applaud Pete for making it happen.

That’ll have to do for now. Have a good week and hopefully someone other than Tom or I will be covering week 148.