Weeks 541 & 542

We’ve all continued to work for FutureLearn, although Ben was on jury service for all of week 541 and the first couple of days of week 542.

Chris and James continue to work onsite at FutureLearn. I understand that the work is going well and that they’re enjoying pairing with other members of the team.

Ben and I have been working mostly remotely and are currently adding support for the Strong Customer Authentication requirements that come into force in September. I’ve been particularly impressed by some of the new (to me, at least) functionality in JavaScript (e.g. promises, template strings and fetch), and by the Stripe API.

Ben and I also spent a day working on the School Cuts project. We’d left an unmerged branch and paid the price of having to rebase on some fairly significant changes that had been made since we last worked on it. It was a good reminder of why long running branches are bad. We also prepared the data for schools in Northern Ireland.

Chris and James hosted our monthly drinks up in Camden on Wednesday. I couldn’t make it but I hear that they, and the other attendees, had a good evening.

Being busy with client work, and not working in the same location, has meant that GFR has been a bit unloved. We’ve arranged an away day for the beginning of July and I’m hopeful we’ll be able to discuss the things that are being neglected and decide what we want to do about them.

That’s about it for now.

Until next time.

– Chris