Week 261

So these are probably the latest weeknotes ever - sorry!

Over the weekend I managed to do a “soft release” of Mocha v1.0 which was a bit of a milestone. Taking eight years to reach v1.0 is probably a bit on the long side, but I hope to write more about that soon - I’d like to share a bit about what I’ve learned from developing an open-source Ruby library.

Anyway, thanks to my old boss Ben Griffiths for encouraging me to develop Mocha in the first place and to all my colleagues at Reevoo, GFR & the wider Ruby community who have helped me in its development over the years.

Work at FutureLearn continued apace. A lot of recent effort has been directed at peer assessment functionality which is coming on a treat. It’s been interesting to try out the learner workflow within the team before it goes “live”.

The development team has recently decided to take on Tech Support, QA and Ops roles on a rota basis. I think this is a really healthy sign of developers wanting to take responsibility for the whole end-to-end process of deploying changes to the app and is in the true spirit of DevOps.

At long last we finally seem to be making some progress in the long and sorry saga of making changes to who can access our HSBC bank account. I note that we started this process back in Novermber of last year and we still haven’t got everything sorted out!

We spent quite a bit of time sorting out things to do with the office - both dealing with the aftermath of the leak from the office upstairs and handling queries from people interested in taking on the lease. On the plus side, it seems as if we’re making progress on both fronts.

One of the most significant events of the week was our decision to draw our work at FutureLearn to a conclusion. We’ve been there since the middle of last April and it’s been a very happy and (we think) productive time, but we’ve decided that we need to take some time out to re-group and think about the future direction of GFR.

It wasn’t an easy decision and we spent much of Wednesday talking discussing different options, but given we’re in the fortunate situation that we don’t urgently need more client work, it seemed like a good opportunity to pause for thought.

– James