Week 148

Hello lovelies.

Friendly Introduction

The chaos goddess has shined her luminous bosom in my direction this week. Thanks are partly due to the beautiful unfolding of the cosmos and partly due to this commit in which James A managed to locate and unravel a kinky-kink in the space time continuum. Imagine a giant pearl necklace, no, even bigger than that, massive, each pearl the size of a million enchanted forests, but this is just a scale, it is much bigger, more real AND this is the tip of the iceberg of beauty in which we are swimming, imagine it.

Now come back.

So with our friendly introductory discourse dealt with, lets get straight to the hard facts.

Hard facts

We’ve been continuing with our work on Gov.uk, rolling out some bad ass features as standard. We switched to one week iterations from two week ones we started out with (this was initially to line up team working on the Citizen focused offering). I much prefer this as it feels like you can bury your nose in and focus, for a nice maintainable pace over the week, with a planning game before the weekend break, and we can come back fresh to it.

I guess tighter feedback loops with our users is also argument for doing it, but as we were deploying in shorter intervals than once per sprint anyway, we’ve been pretty tight with our users from the start.

Drawing perfect circles for infinity

When we were working on #blue I was bothering Tom about some link-to-and-back-from pages in the app dependent on the context of where the user has come from or was intending to do.

As usual Tom had “some code to do that” which we popped right in (after writing some tests for it, natch).

It turned out that we’d like something similar for Gov.uk, so we have made a Gem aptly called Boomerang to wrap up the functionality. Our limbs cleansed and free, we can use it wherever we please — and because it’s on github you can too!

Talkin’ ‘bout The Smiling Geohash Blues

Longtime readers (for at least a couple of weeks) may know about Tom’s Geohash Toy Thing with which you can get all crazy with the Geohashes. If you don’t know why you would want to go all crazy with the Geohashes, then you need to go listen to Tom talk about why you want to go all crazy with the Geohashes at the GeoMob November Shindig happening next week.

Chris Wants To Bag It Up

On tuesday our friends at Hackney Council came round and sorted out our recycling for us; for a little fee (bout a-quid-fiddy per bag) they will take away our paper mache monsters and turn them into fancy loo roll and organic hamster cardigans.

We are very happy about this because we like to keep our relationship with Mother Nature the same colour as our test suite.

Party, Karamu, Fiesta, Forever!

Yesterday the INTERNET was ah-blaze with the news of our “totally rad” Office Warmpocalypse. It was well Bieber.

Yes! Our massive space needs to be filled with toxic substances and human bodies in order to test the parameters of our fire code.

You, Dear Reader are forever invited to come and make history at the biennial Go Free Range office ceremony where we will all join hands and witness the consummation.

All the details are laid out for your eyes and it would be royally splendid if you would grace our humble abode with your beautiful instance of human.

Roos is a lightweight

Not sure what happened but our intrepid hairy-code deleting-surf hippy-stalwart of good times-Chris-MotherFlippin-Roos came in at like 2pm today. Rumour is going round that now that Chris has entered deep into Old Age (30) that he can no longer handle his drinks.

Better make it a shandy tonight then, Chris.

Dramatic Farewell

I hope your mind is free and your hearts pumping fast for the weekend ahead.

May all your Oscar Wildest dreams come true.

JASE.