Week 575

• Chris and I spent about a day working on the project for the University of Oxford. We’re building a tool to help people report on and visualise characteristics of light. I’m enjoying working in/learning about a subject I’m unfamiliar with; and am also enjoying the change offered by developing it all in client side JavaScript. Chris fixed a bug in our JS port of a Matlab function, and I used chart.js to add a visualisation of the uploaded light spectra.

• James continued to catch up on some of the great work Nitish and others have been doing on Mocha. I was particularly interested to learn about some of Nitish’s motivations for working on Mocha. James has created a Mocha Slack channel to facilitate more ad hoc conversation about the project.

• James ticked off a long-running task of paying into Ben’s pension. Ben’s been trying to contact his existing pension provider to get the forms necessary for us to pay into it. Unfortunately the pension appears to be in some odd state that no number of phone calls can unlock. Ben’s agreed for us to pay his pension into NEST rather than continue to fight to sort his existing pension out.

• We celebrated the initial release of the TAA project with some custom mission patches :-) It’s been great to see a steady stream of users coming to the site, and to receive some useful feedback from a small number of them. I’m really pleased we’ve got something that’s being used by real people.

• We started the next TAA sprint and came up with the goal of inviting quite a few more users to use the app. Our initial users were those with ticketing data and we’re now opening it up to those with survey data too. While the focus was on making the changes necessary to invite survey users; we also switched from Materialize to Bootstrap, improved our ability to recover from a failed ETL process and improved the performance of the catchment area calculation.