Week 287

Apologies for the late arrival of these notes - my excuse is that Chris & I headed down to the seaside (!) yesterday to attend Brighton Ruby Conference.

Chris was away last Monday having spent a long weekend navigating the waterways (and public houses) between Reading and Newbury on a narrowboat.

LRUG

I went along to LRUG on Monday evening. I particularly enjoyed the talk by Rosa Fox on her experiences starting out as a professional software developer and how Codebar had helped her, and the talk (and live-coding examples) by Tom Stuart on Rspec.

It was also nice to catch up with a number of the FutureLearn folk over a beer afterwards.

Trello

We spent much of the week making a determined assault on our company Trello board which had got a bit out of hand. Chris selflessly threw himself into the swamp of PayPal bureaucracy by attempting to update the details on our company account.

Some time ago, we were finding that it was rather too easy to add things to our Trello To Do list, so we introduced a separate Triage list. The idea was that any new tasks weren’t obviously necessary or urgent would be added to this list. However, the Triage list had become a rather stagnant backwater and so we decided to institute a new weekly Harmonia task to remind us to actually do some triaging.

Other news

Last Wednesday we had a visit from a prospective client who wants to do some on-demand patterned fabric printing which sounds really interesting. We also made a start at advertising our surplus office furniture.

Towards the end of the week, we decided to treat ourselves to writing a bit of code! We thought it would be nice to turn our FreeAgent Transaction Explainer bookmarklet into a fully-fledged Chrome Extension. Our plan is to make the extension configurable with different rules, so it can be used by other people. We made some good progress and we hope to finish it off in the next day or so.

As you might’ve gathered, we’ve lost a bit of momentum on Project Credit Union. However, never fear, we do plan to come back to it in the near future. Watch this space!

– James.