Week 256

Mornin’ all. I trust you all enjoyed your weekends. Mine was mostly been spent recovering from two nights of being led astray by our FutureLearn friends; after an away day on Thursday and then the Crimbo party on Friday.

The away day was at the British Library, and was really enjoyable and productive. It was filled with a couple of presentations, some group exercises and great talks from both James Bridle and Russell Davies.

On the development front, I’ve been working on adding another component that can be used in the FutureLearn courses. This has been slightly more painful than we’d like and so we’ve started exploring some alternative approaches that will better model our requirements. It feels as though it should be possible to improve the system now that we have a better understanding of what we need.

James was in charge of the GFR networking function over the last week, attending both LRUG on Monday and Ruby business on Wednesday. The LRUG talk about Rails Assets sounded pretty interesting and I’d be quite keen to give it a go in the near future.

One of James’s OxRUG buddies, Tom, joined him at Ruby business and then joined us at GFR HQ for the afternoon. We had a bit of a chat about the possibility of working together in future and also ended up having an interesting chat about developing Rails apps using the Objects on Rails patterns. We’ve definitely experienced some of the pains of following the Rails way as applications grow larger, but we’ve also struggled when we’ve deviated from the Rails way in the past. I wonder if our problems were simply down to not having a set of alternative conventions to replace those we we’ve come to know in Rails and maybe sticking to something like Objects on Rails would help. I’d be interested in exploring this a bit more in future.

All that’s left to say is that it’s our Crimbo party on Wednesday. It’d be great if you could add yourself to Lanyrd or email us to let us know if you’re planning to come: We need to know how much mull juice to buy.

– Chris