Week 149

Well hello there everybody peeps. It’s me. Again. And these are late. Again. Whatever.

I’m sure you all enjoyed following along with ticketgate in which we learnt that James doesn’t like cheap conference tickets. I am jesting, obviously. To me, the whole affair shows just how committed James is to challenging the status quo. And not challenging, as was suggested at one point, by saying, “You’re doing it wrong. Do it like this.”, but challenging by really questioning the motivation behind certain decisions. Although not a fight I would pick myself I applaud James’s determination in his battle against cheap conference tickets the status quo.

We made some good progress toward the single domainedness (consistent interface across all the apps) of the GovUK project this week, specifically with the introduction of slimmer into the Whitehall codebase. Although that took quite a while, we also managed to do some work around storing files on S3, refining the concept of Publications in the system, popping on a lick of paint and we even spent a short while writing a little bit of unobtrusive javascript google maps magic. Plus, cough plummy cough.

Oh, and the other big GovUK news is that we’ve been paid - woohoo.

James A and I spent a couple of hours working on Harmonia on Wednesday. The aim was to fix a little bug that had reared its head on a couple of occassions. We took the opportunity to practise some more-extreme-than-normal paired test driven development: one person would write a test and the other would make it pass in the simplest way possible. It was definitely an interesting experiment and it felt good to go back to basics and question some of the fundamental blocks that our practice sits upon.

On Wednesday James A, James M and I met with some people that are possibly after some development goodness in the New Year. We’ll have to wait to see how that goes.

Thursday evening saw our very own Mr Tom Ward presenting at the Geomob November 2011 meet-up. I wasn’t able to make it (mainly because I forgot it was on and had made other plans) but I’m sure Tom did a great job, even if he did feel like a bit of a fraud presenting in front of all the hardcore map aficiandos.

Jase and I learnt what it means to be a fire warden at a little training session on Friday. I must admit to wondering what we were going to get out of it (there are only 5 of us and we’re not always in the office) but I can definitely see the benefit now.

We finished off the week with a GovUK Show and Tell and then a lovely team trip to the pub: Neil had an evening pass so we celebrated with lots of beer. It was good.

I’m going to end with another plug for our office warming this Thursday (1st December). Come along: You never know, it might be alright.

Have good weeks everybody peeps. Over and out.