Week 316

Unfortunately I was off sick all week again this week. However, I did improve enough towards the end of the week so that I was able to do some work on a presentation about pair programming which we’d been asked to give at FutureLearn. In particular it was a good opportunity to re-read sections of eXtreme Programming explained by Kent Beck.

Meanwhile Chris was at FutureLearn all week except Wednesday doing lots of pairing. He worked with Chris L to reduce some of the noise of intermittent failures reported in Honeybadger. Although it took them a while, the result (using Honeybadger filters instead of Sidekiq middleware) is definitely simpler to understand.

He also worked with Ricardo at the end of the week trying to address a problem where the queue processing machines were using a lot of RAM. They investigated removing Sidetiq in favour of Cron, in the hope that having fewer moving parts would help make it easier to understand what was going on.

Both Chris & I worked from home on Wednesday mainly working through various admin tasks. We also caught up with each other using a Google Hangout which was useful, although I think we’re both missing having our own office.

Having cancelled our January Show and Tell event, because it would’ve been in the middle of packing up the Worship Street office, we were really keen to find a venue to hold the February event. To this end, we booked a small room at the Star of Kings pub near Kings Cross.

– James