Week 846

Week beginning Monday, 31st March 2025.

This was a much quieter week after the excitement of the launch of Experience CS. We tidied up some loose ends, did some planning for the next sprint, and started working on the custom Scratch development environment. To help with the planning we did a story mapping exercise which I found quite helpful in thinking about the overall scope of the project. We’ve also done more pairing and mobbing this week which has been good.

One weird thing was that we discovered a bunch of Ruby-related Dependabot security alerts that had obviously been hanging around for a week or two. It seems as if there was some kind of low-level error when Dependabot tried to create a pull request to fix each of the alerts. I tried clicking the “Re-try” button to try automatically creating the pull request again, but the same error occurred. In the end I created the pull requests manually. It’s a bit frustrating that we weren’t alerted about the errors. I’d be interested to hear if anyone else has had similar problems.

Since the introduction of the Online Safety Act, we’ve had some nagging concerns that it might affect jam.coop, the online music store which Chris L has built. I recently came across a lawyer, Neil Brown, who specialises in this area and who’s produced a bunch of useful resources published under Creative Commons licenses. I contacted him through his company and he suggested we have a brief initial chat to see whether we needed legal advice.

Chris L & I had a video call with Neil on Thursday and he was able to quickly reassure us that we didn’t have much to worry about. He’s recommended that we use OFCOM’s assessment tool which he thinks will only take us 30 minutes. As an aside, he also recommendeded that we create a privacy policy using the ICO’s tool. We really appreciated Neil’s help and would recommend him to anyone who needs advice in this area of law.

I did the 3-yearly pension re-enrolment dance for the Pension Regulator. I actually did this last week, but it was obviously so interesting I forgot to mention it! In more exciting news, Chris R is due to catch up with Marty Haught from Ruby Central this afternoon to try to make some progress on the Rubyforge redirects work. I’m really pleased and grateful to Chris and Marty that this is still moving forwards.

Anyway, I think that just about wraps it up.

Until next time.

– James