Week 834

Week beginning Monday, 6th January 2025.

Happy New Year, everyone! 🎉

We’ve all had a good break from work, although some of us are more well-rested than others with both Chris L & Chris R having arrived back from Colombia & Australia last weekend. Having had a longer break than usual, I certainly found it a considerable shock to the system to come back to work, so I can’t imagine it was very easy having to deal with jet-lag too!

We started a new client project on Tuesday which we’re very excited about, although we can’t say much about it yet! Anyway, it was great to meet up with each other and many of the project team in person for a day of kick-off meetings. The majority of our client work since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic has been entirely remote, so it was a lovely change to meet people in person and chat over coffees and lunch in between meetings.

Although Chris L & Chris R have both been using it since a few weeks ago, this has been my first week using Pop for pairing and mobbing. I have quite fond memories of it from when it was called “Screenhero” and I haven’t been disappointed with it so far.

As well as the client work, we’ve also been dealing with a backlog of company admin from the holiday period. However, it feels as if we’ve broken the back of that now! 😅

Chris L did a load of work on Jam over the break. I haven’t chatted to him about it yet, but it looks like he’s updated its dependencies, upgraded Rails, extracted more view components, and generally done a bunch of tidying up. I’m really grateful to him for continuing to move the project forwards!

Similarly, I did quite a bit of work on Mocha while we were away. I’ve been finding it harder and harder to maintain Mocha, because I only tend to dip into the code sporadically. Each time it takes me quite a while to get my head back into it, which reduces my motivation to do it the next time. So this time I made a determined effort to sort some stuff out which should make it at least slightly easier to come back to it next time!

While doing this I also had what I hope was a brainwave about a bug related to keyword arguments that’s been hanging around for a while. Anyway, I’m hoping to get Mocha v3.0 released in the not too distant future. As ever I’m incredibly grateful to my wonderful colleagues and my GitHub sponsors for their support!

It’s been gratifying to see a significant number of Mission Patch orders come in over the last few weeks, especially those from returning customers. Not unreasonably, one customer asked whether they could make a single payment for 4 packs of stickers with different designs. However, we don’t currently have “shopping basket” functionality on the site, so I hand-crafted a Stripe payment link which did the job nicely.

I also took the opportunity to use our drop-shipping partner’s API to create a single order with multiple items. This went pretty smoothly and has provided valuable insights into how we could implement a shopping basket on the site. I’m keen to do this in the near future.

Anyway, that’s all for now.

Until next time!

– James