Week 394

We took advantage of not working on Smart Answers to take things slightly easier this week.

This suited me as I had to spend some time moving between temporary accommodation during the week: we’ve been staying with family and in Airbnb rentals since moving back from New Zealand in July.

Smart Answers

We both finished a couple of things that we didn’t quite manage before we left GDS last week.

I finished some marriage-abroad work that I’d originally started in early June! It felt good to complete and it’ll hopefully mean that it’s easier to ensure services and fees are displayed consistently.

James investigated building upon his work in PRs 2667 and 2670. PRs 2667 and 2670 allowed content designers and developers to easily find the ERB template corresponding to landing, question and outcome pages in Smart Answers. James was hoping to extend this to support linking to partial templates too. Unfortunately this proved to be much harder than expected and James took the pragmatic decision to document the various approaches he’d tried and to hand it over to the Smart Answers developers.

Week links

We managed to publish some links in week 394! This has been a much neglected task over the past few months so we’re going to see if we can start publishing them again.

Mocha

I’ve agreed to share some of the responsibility for Mocha and got stuck in by investigating PR 244. I got as far as replicating/understanding the problem it was solving but still need to understand the fix.

Free lunch

Jase invited us to lunch at Facebook on Wednesday. It was great to catch up and to have a bit of a tour of the Facebook offices.

James and I then retired to the pub for a couple of pints in the sun and to talk about what’s next for GFR.

Hookline

James and I have agreed to do some more work with Hookline after working with them in weeks 348 and 351.

We spent a couple of hours on Friday reminding ourselves of where we’d got to before meeting Amy and Rach for lunch at the Hospital Club. We had a good chat about what they’ve been up to and what we can most usefully do for them.

We’ve agreed that we’ve still got the same goal of creating a single tool for them to manage their music catalogue and to be able to respond to briefs. We hope to be able to make some good progress with this over the next couple of weeks.

Until next time.

– Chris