Week 309

Inevitably this was a relatively quiet week in the lead up to the Christmas break. Chris did his last day at FutureLearn on Monday and then spent much of Tuesday and Wednesday planning the logistics of moving out of our office next year.

The plan is that the British Heart Foundation are going to take away our two smaller sofas, Hackney Council are going to deal with the older chairs & desks we inherited, and Rocket Van are going to move the rest into our self-storage unit.

Chris also did a bit of digging into the history of GFR shares which turns out not to be completely straightforward. It’s made me think again about building a simple Share Registrar service for small companies.

On Thursday morning Chris jetted off to the sunshine Down Under. I can’t pretend I’m not jealous, but I hope he and Amy have a great holiday!

On Tuesday we hosted another London Computation Club meeting at which chapter four of the NAND2TETRIS book was discussed. Working through the exercises together on the projector was again very rewarding, although this time I was in the driving seat!

For the rest of the week I was holding the metaphorical GFR fort at FutureLearn and doing a lot more pair programming. A few things that have come up in these sessions: outside-in/top-down test-driven development and how it complements YAGNI; writing a failing test before fixing a bug; and curating your commits.

For more on the latter, I’m looking forward to Joel Chippindale’s Telling Stories Through Commits talk at January’s LRUG meeting.

Anyway, I hope everyone has a good break over the festive season.

Best wishes.

– James.