Week 203 - Spending more time with our family

In the last weeknotes I wrote about finishing our work with GDS. That means this week we’ve been working exclusively on our own things. So what have we done with our time?

At the moment our main focus is harmonia. Here are some of the things we’ve added in the last week:

• We’ve changed the way timezones work. Sadly we don’t have the power to remove timezones from this world, and force all countries to use UTC (or maybe Swatch beats). What we can and have done is to make sure each team has only one timezone; a much more consistent experience.

• It’s now possible to have tasks that repeat fortnightly (or every 3 weeks, or 4 weeks, or 7 weeks or….). Useful if you’re using harmonia to decide who should take out the recycling.

• Tasks using iCal are now more powerful, and even more helpfully you can see when they will occur while you’re setting them up. This should make them much more useful.

• We’re also have other features that are close to release, including some clever stuff with email and a blog for all your harmonia news.

As well as working on harmonia, I also attended Clojure Exchange. I’ve only dabbled in Clojure (though I really like it), so it was great to hear people with way more experience. In general the talks were good, and I particularly enjoyed our ex-GDS colleague Phil Potter talking about persistent data structures. The whole clojure community seemed thoughtful, intelligent, friendly and respectful; mirroring the personality of Rich Hickey.

That’s it from me this week. I doubt I’ll be writing them next week as I’ve deleted a random file from my laptop. Let’s hope it wasn’t important.

Don’t forget we are having Christmas drinks a week on Wednesday. All are welcome.

Until next time,

Tom

This week’s notes were powered by the existential angst caused by turning 35, and were cheered on by the Have I Got News For You studio audience.