Week 503

Hello! All four of us were working and co-located this week. It feels like this is the first time it has happened for a while with all of us taking leave at different times over the summer. We made the most of it by taking a day away from our current client project to reflect and plan during our quarterly “away day”.

The Trainline

We continued working for our client The Trainline. We are continuing to work with them to improve monitoring of third-party systems and consolidate the trainline.eu and trainline.com code bases.

Away Day

On Tuesday we spent a few hours at the West Reservoir Centre in Hackney. This sailing and open-water swimming centre also has a great conference room with views over the reservoir and a pleasant cafe. We divided the time into short sessions where we discussed upcoming client work opportunities, how to make the most of our non-client time and whether we want to get some help with our routine administrative tasks. I think we made some good decisions in all of these areas but also, more importantly, took some time to reach a shared understanding of what we’ve done and where we want to go. In the afternoon we had a table booked at the board game cafe above the EXP Cantina at Swan Wharf. It’s a huge open space with a great selection of board games. The staff their helped us choose some suitable games to play. I particularly enjoyed our game of the co-operative classic Pandemic - so much so that I bought a copy to play at home.

We’re all together again this Friday in our office in Whitechapel - as well as tying up some admin loose-ends we should be able to make a bit of progress on our side-project.