Week 412

We agreed on a couple of goals for this week: to make some progress on our website and to spend at least a day working on anything that interests us.

We worked from The Office Group locations in Whitechapel and Bloomsbury as well as from our respective homes.

We both took the afternoon off on Thursday so that James and Chris L could pop over to see the houseboat. We had an enjoyable afternoon of food, wandering, chatting and drinking.

We met Hookline in the fancy Hospital Club on Friday for a general catch-up. It sounds as though they’ve been making good progress in trying to work out a direction for the product we’ve been building with them.

Website

We spent about half a day working on our website together. We have a number of improvements in the backlog that never seem to get prioritised; agreeing to work on it together allowed us to get through a good few of them. While we both thought this worked quite well we agreed that it would’ve been even better if we’d spent more time on it.

Fun times - OTP

I spent some time investigating One-Time Passwords (OTP). I use Authy to generate OTPs for a number of sites/services but didn’t really have any idea how it worked. I started out reading about the subject before diving in and starting to implement the HOTP spec in Ruby. I’ve made some progress and hope to continue working on it next week.

Fun times - Chess and Raspberry Pi

James split his time between chess hardware hacking and Raspberry Pi playing.

He continued to make progress on wiring up his chess board before getting stuck. He then moved on to configuring a Raspberry Pi Zero to act as a combined webcam and temperature and humidity sensor. It sounds as though getting this working somewhat made up for the problems James ran into when wiring up the chess board.

Platform Cooperatives Conference

Oliver at Open Coop brought the Open:2017 conference to our attention. We don’t know much about “Platform Cooperatives” but it looked interesting enough that we decided to buy a couple of tickets. It’s being held at Goldsmiths in February next year and tickets are still available.

Having done a bit more investigation in the course of writing this post, it looks as though the (relatively lengthy) “Platform Cooperativism vs. the Sharing Economy” blog post contains some background behind the term.

Digital Outcomes & Specialists 2

We finalised our submission for the Digital Outcomes and Specialists 2 framework. We both agreed that we were happy to stick with the same offerings that we listed in DOS1 which made the process slightly less cumbersome.

That’s about all for this week. Until next time.

– Chris