Week 504

As has become the norm of late, we spent most of the week continuing our work at Trainline, although I was away on Thursday and Friday to do my RYA Day Skipper course sailing in the Solent. Chris L was also away on Friday afternoon.

Recently my main focus at Trainline has been refactoring an area of the codebase which was unnecessarily executing asynchronously (via EventMachine) to execute synchronously. This area of the code make extensive use of callback methods and I’m hopeful that eventually we’ll be able to avoid this thereby significantly simplifying the code.

While we’ve been at Trainline Ben got us into the habit of writing a set of week notes to send to the client focussing on things we’ve learnt, things we’re worried about, and what the plan is for the following week. This has felt like a natural extension of our company week notes and fits in well with our desire to be as open and transparent as possible.

We’ve been working four days a week at Trainline and, because of the level of commitment we bring to our client work, we’ve found it pretty intense. A knock-on effect of this is that we’ve all been finding it hard to find the energy and focus to work effectively on internal projects on the one day a week when we’re not doing client work. This is definitely something that Chris R and I have struggled with in the past; hopefully between the four of us we can come up with a better working pattern in the future.

That’s all for now. Until next time.

– James