Week 288

Brighton Ruby Conference

James and I joined a couple of hundred other like-minded people at Brighton Ruby Conference on Monday. It was a beautiful day to spend on the coast. It was just unfortunate that the venue wasn’t particularly well suited to the weather: I found it way too hot in the conference room. Temperature aside, I thought Andy did a great job of organising and running the conference.

I think my favourites were Despo and Rosa talking about Codebar, and Tom Stuart’s 5 minute lightning talk about the Burrows-Wheeler transform. For a good overview of the conference, I can recommend Kyan’s summary. Read about it on their blog in parts one and two.

Project Credit Union

You’ll have noticed that it’s all gone a little quiet on the Project Credit Union front. James and I have been taking a little break to concentrate on some software development.

I did speak to ABCUL on Tuesday, about both our study group application and the possibility of becoming a supplier to the Credit Union Expansion Project (CUEP).

On the CUEP front, I was told that we’re unable to become a supplier as they have everything in place that they need. Apparently they ran a closed tender process where an existing IT supplier helped them choose from a number of vendors that should allow them to meet their goals.

I do wish they’d be a little more public about what they’re planning to do with the CUEP. I suspect there’s quite a crossover with what we’re trying to do, but it’s difficult to know for sure as the project scope and timescales don’t appear to be public.

On the study group front, we’ve had our application accepted and have made the payment so we’re just waiting to receive our membership information.

FreeAgent Transaction Explainer

We continued to work on our FreeAgent Transaction Explainer Chrome Extension. We’ve got it to a state that allows James and I to use it, and are planning to finish a few other things before hopefully getting it published in the Chrome Web Store. We’re not entirely sure how useful this’ll be to anyone else but we’ve enjoyed working on, and learning about, something slightly different.

Turning down work

Last week, James mentioned that we’d met a prospective client who’s looking to offer on-demand fabric printing. Having spent some time looking into their requirements, we realised that they might be better off using another supplier (someone with experience of Shopify in this case). While we were confident that we could do the work, we didn’t think that it was the best thing for this particular client. James A did a great job of writing about this in his 2010 post, “Sometimes success means not building software”, and it’s certainly something we continue to stick by.

Chris “Dub” Lowis

Chris Lowis joined us in the office on Wednesday. He managed to put the finishing touches to his “Creating dub delay effects with the Web Audio API” blog post and get it published. Good work, Chris!

Beers with FutureLearn

We finished up on Friday by visiting our chums at FutureLearn. They had planned a picnic in the park but the weather forced them to find an alternative. The alternative turned out to be an impromptu pub quiz in a pub basement - just like the good ol’ days. Thanks for the invite, FutureLearn: It was great to see y’all.

Until next time.

– Chris