Week 286

G’day, folks.

Week 286 was pretty short for us, with James away from Tuesday to Friday and me away on Friday.

Project Credit Union

It was inevitably a bit of a slow week on the credit union front. In fact, we only managed to work on it for a couple of days which we’ve written up in slightly more detail:

• Day 10 - Monday
• Day 11 - Tuesday

I spent quite a while trying to understand the Credit Union Expansion Project and how that might relate to what we’re trying to do. As far as I can tell, there might well be some crossover between the expansion project and our own plans in that they’re hoping to offer online banking to existing credit unions. Unfortunately, there appears to be very little information about how the project is going: It’s all gone pretty quiet since it was announced that ABCUL had won the bid in April 2013.

We’re now wondering whether it’s worth speaking to ABCUL to see if they’re able to give us any information and to see if we might be able to get involved with the expansion project at all.

Show and Tell

Wednesday evening saw us host our third Show and Tell event (previously in weeks 274 and 282). Six of us gathered around the projector, four of us talked about something we’d worked on and everyone contributed to the discussion.

I spoke about something I cobbled together to visualise my Barclays Cycle Hire use on a Google Map. It’s gimmicky more than useful but it was a pretty fun little exercise to see how much I could get done with Google Drive and limited programming.

Murray spoke about his work to convert lrug.org to a static site. Murray’s currently investigating Middleman and appears to have made good progress in getting quite a few of the pages converted. There was some interesting discussion afterward about alternative approaches, and how Murray might get other people involved to help him with the work.

In a little downtime between talking, Murray mentioned that Google appear to have created a PDF containing all his Google Reader shared items, made it publicly available in Google Drive and linked to it from his Google+ profile. They’ve also named it Buzz (rather than Reader), presumably because they folded all Google Reader content in to Buzz before destroying that? Murray’s not sure whether this is something he asked for but was kinda happy that he found it.

Ryan spoke about Meat Club, a project he started as an antidote to spending all day in front of a computer. Ryan explained how he’s using GitHub to maintain his recipes and how he hopes to publish them, either as a beautifully illustrated book or possibly as some kind of interactive mobile app that’ll help guide you through the cooking process.

Chris Lowis brought us up to speed with a blog post he’s been working on for a while. It appears to be pretty much ready to publish but it was interesting to hear about some of the challenges he’s faced: at least one extreme browser bug that nearly made him go deaf and his attempts at reducing the duplication in the displayed versus executed code.

We inevitably ran on longer than planned but I don’t think anyone minded too much. We finished up by talking about how we might increase the number of people involved while still retaining the ability for everyone to be involved. We’re not sure what we’ll try yet but we’ll continue to experiment with the format to see how it goes.

Company Trello

Before James left on Monday, we spent around an hour trying to get our company Trello board into a bit of a better shape. We were using the Card Aging Power-Up but that had resulted in a shedload of unreadble cards that we then ignored. We’ve now disabled that and have added a Harmonia task to prompt us to ensure we keep on top of it at least once a week.

And with that I’ll bid y’all goodbye.