Week 870 & 871

James has been hiking in Spain for the last two weeks, we’re looking forward to catching up on his adventures when he’s back next week.

Last week we said “so long” to Seb who’s been working with us on the Raspberry Pi project for the past few months. It’s been amazing having Seb on the team, and if you need a talented, kind full-stack developer ask us for an introduction. Thanks Seb!

We’ve collectively reduced the time we spend on the project a little so progress has been a bit slower. Over the last two weeks we’ve mostly been working on adding a “bulk add” feature to the foundation’s classroom management tool. I think we’ve ended up in a good place - getting the UX right for these kind of bulk operation features is always quite tricky, but we’ve managed to keep things simple. It’s reminded me though that everything (for me at least) is much harder and slower with a client-server architecture (in this case React with a Rails API backed) than a monolithic one.

We’ve also been refactoring code to make the separation between the customised Scratch editor and the curriculum pages cleaner. This should hopefully make it easier to use the editor in other places in the future.

Here’s a few things we’ve enjoyed on the web over the last couple of weeks (and to be honest, we need a bit of light relief):

• Winning formulae: Briton bidding to be ‘world’s best spreadsheeter’ at Las Vegas competition
• Can coding agents build complex systems? from our friend, Zetter.
• The Raspberry Pi Foundation’s quick read about pair programming
• The Theatre of Pull Requests and Code Review has some good tips on telling stories with your commits.
• PikaPods are instant hosts for open source projects. I set up an RSS reader in a few minutes and have been using it happily since.