Week 865

Week beginning Monday, 11th August 2025.

These weeknotes are all that stand between me and a two-week break. Let’s do this thing.

Experience CS

We’ve been finishing up the remaining work to make the Experience CS site available in French and Latin American Spanish (that’s es-419 language code fans). We made it possible to download variations of our “quick read” documents (that are authored and stored in Google Drive) in all 3 languages and automated the importing of translations from Crowdin back into our rails app.

We’re starting to see increased usage of the site and subsequently a few more, rarer, exceptions in Sentry. We added a bit of additional context to the Sentry reports to make them easier to reproduce and fixed some issues around authentication token refreshing. We also made the redirection page that some users see when signing in to the site friendlier and less confusing in cases where Javascript is not available.

We also started some work to make it possible to associate a Scratch project with many lessons. This allows teachers to spread a project over several in-class sessions. And we’ve been adding some instrumentation to allow various metrics to be more easily calculated in our BigQuery/Looker dashboards.

Business development

We’ve been talking to a couple of organisations about future projects. There’s nothing concrete to report on this front yet. We’re always on the lookout for interesting, impactful work so please do get in touch.

jam.coop

We’ve had a few new albums added to jam recently, including one from our friend Pedro. We also received some unsolicited and positive feedback from users of jam via email. This is always encouraging and fun to read.

Shared on Slack

A few things that made us 🤔 or 😂:

• The LLMentalist Effect: how chat-based Large Language Models replicate the mechanisms of a psychic’s con.
• ecosia: “We’ve started delivering search results from our new European-based search index to Ecosia users! This will help us build the kind of ethical and fair internet we believe in.”
• Greg Wallace’s accidental Partridge.