Week 440

We spent the first two days of this week based out of our usual
co-working space near the British Museum. On Wednesday James took a
few days off to visit the Isle of Wight while Chris R headed to France
for the Mont-Blanc 80k
run. I held the fort for the second half of the week.

Working in the way we do allows us to have some flexibility in where
and when we work and with a newly-arrived baby it has been interesting
to experiment with working patterns that work well for me and my
family. I spent a couple of hours in the local library - they’ve
recently refurbished and, in order to cut costs, switched to an
automated system for door entry. It was good to spend time in the
library training room and to take advantage of the free, if somewhat
restricted¹, WiFi provided by Camden Council.

On Tuesday the three of us went in to Aviation House to catch up with
Daniel about our progress on Manuals Publisher and to learn more about
the next phase of our project. Our client are keen for us to start
looking at the systems that managed uploaded assets, to consolidate
the different approaches into a single place and to look at switching
away from a self-maintained NFS file store to something in the
cloud. This sounds like an interesting mix of research, refactoring
and development and we’re keen to get stuck in next week.

In the meantime I spent some time documenting where we have got to in
our work on Manuals Publisher with the aim of leaving some notes on
how we might further refactor and improve the application. I
used plantuml to draw some diagrams - I still
haven’t found a better tool for this kind of diagram (I really like
that the source code that generates the diagram can be versioned) but
it certainly feels as though the website and documentation could use
some love.

We took care of a few GFR tasks including these weeknotes, invoicing
and organising some of our upcoming events. I also spent a little bit
of time playing with hledger
a plaintext accounting tool. I’m
interested to see if we can convert our transaction history
from FreeAgent into
the
ledger format and
in doing so take advantage of some of
the tools in that
ecosystem to do some automated reporting of our finances.

The weather in London is beautiful but wherever you are, have a
great weekend.