Week 856

Week beginning Monday, 9th June 2025.

James was away this week, camping on the Isles of Scilly. Meanwhile Chris, Seb and I continued working on Experience CS the computer science education platform we’re building with the Raspberry Pi Foundation.

We’re tackling a couple of chunkier backend pieces of work this week. One is an integration between the site and [CrowdIn][crowdin], a SaaS for creating translations of website content. Our colleague gave a great demo of how he and his team use CrowdIn to translate sites at the Foundation which helped me to understand the big picture. Seb has been working on the integration. It uses Github as an intermediary so that changes to the Rails localisation files and the database content can be synchronised back-and-forth between the two systems.

Chris and I were pairing on the integration between Experience CS and the Foundation’s learning management tool. This work will allow teachers to find a scratch project they’d like their students to work on, assign that to their class and then “collect in” the work of the students to see their progress.

Around all that I spent a tiring night in the local A&E after my foot swelled up suddenly as a result of falling over at a “Dad’s sports day”. I was happy to get the all-clear, nothing hurt but pride, but it’s really thrown my sleep out this week!

Links

A few links we’ve shared with each other on our internal Slack channel.

• docs.coop is a new “Co-operatively hosted open source document editing” tool from our friends at Autonomic.
• milkdown is a framework for building markdown editors.
• scrappy “make little apps for you and your friends”

And we continue to navigate the hype/excitement/fear of “AI”

• Trusting your own judgement on AI is a huge risk: “Our only recourse as a field is the same as with naturopathy: scientific studies by impartial researchers.”
• Why Open Source Maintainers Thrive in the LLM Era: “The optimal path in 2025 is to embrace LLM tools, balancing pragmatic optimism with healthy skepticism regarding dramatic claims from either side.”

Have lovely weekends,

– Chris