Week 264 - Double Rainbow!

Howdi, folks.

Week 264 was mostly spent in our office having now finished up with FutureLearn. We really enjoyed the 41 weeks (starting way back in week 222) we spent working with the team at FutureLearn and are really proud of what they’ve managed to achieve.

Monday saw GFR HQ host the second installment of the Little Schemer book club. I wasn’t able to attend due to being struck down with some crazy voice altering lurgy but I understand that they’re making good progress. Tom Stuart did a great job of writing it all up and painstakingly pulling in commits from various git repositories to his little scheme project.

We’re still looking for someone to take our office and spent quite some time showing round prospective tenants, speaking to our estate agent and dealing with office-related enquiries. There is a tiny part of me that wonders if we should just keep the office to the end of the lease given how long it’s taking to try to find someone to take it from us.

While we certainly had admin things to do, we also wanted to make sure that we did some more fun/exploratory things with our time. To that end, we both focussed on a couple of things we took from The First International Conference on Software Archaeology. I had a go at writing up what I got from the conference. It took me ages to write the blog post as I started writing a simple set of notes about each talk before realising that maybe there was another, potentially more useful, way of slicing it. While I was struggling to write a blog post, James made a great start on a tool that attempts to make it easier to trace the history of a method through a project. This is definitely something I could’ve used in the past and I’m looking forward to see where it goes.

Aside from the TICOSA related work, I spent a short while creating a Greasemonkey like user script to make a tiny improvement to my experience of the HSBC UK business internet banking website. This may appear really gimmicky but I think it’s worth remembering that it’s the beauty of the open technologies of the web that make this sort of thing possible.

Having had a final meeting with FutureLearn on Friday, we ended the week at The Fellow in King’s Cross for ours and That Tommy Hall’s FutureLearn leaving drinks. It was a good send-off and I’m sure it won’t be the last time we share a drink with the team.

All that’s left is to show you the double rainbow that appeared outside while I’ve been writing these notes. Have great weeks y’all.