Weeks 875 to 877

Weeks beginning 20 Oct, 27 Oct and 3 Nov.

We finished up working with the Raspberry Pi Foundation on Experience CS at the end of week 875, took week 876 off and have been working on Jam and some business development this week.

We said farewell to our RPF colleagues at the end of week 875 as our time working on Experience CS came to an end. The week was spent adding a final few features, having some more handover sessions and capped off with a project retro. I’m proud of what we achieved on the project and we’ll be keeping an eye out to see what comes next for Experience CS and Code Editor.

We agreed to reward ourselves at the end of the RPF project by taking week 876 off. The timing was particularly fortunate for me as it meant I could spend the week with my daughter who was off school on her half term break. I feel fortunate to be working in an organisation where we’re able to make these people over profit type decisions.

We started this week feeling fresh and ready to get stuck into some work on Jam. We had a good chat to kick off and came up with a couple of features we felt we could build during the week. We’ve added a basic Albums page (and associated atom feed, natch) to display the most recently added albums which we hope goes someway to answer some feedback we’ve had around not knowing whether the side is still active. We’ve also been working on allowing artists to tag their albums with genres which should allow us to make it easier to discover music that listeners are interested in. I particularly enjoyed the discussion we had around taxonomies vs folksonomies and the fairly deep dive we had into existing music genre taxonomies on wikipedia, musicbrainz and others. It feels liberating to be entirely in control of the decisions we make and the tools and process we use. It’s also incredibly satisfying to build web apps the way we believe they should be build; notably HTML first and progressively enhanced with JavaScript where appropriate.

As part of our work on Jam, we’re also intending to spend some time exploring how we might fund it without relying entirely on our reserves. This is as part of the age old dream we’ve had of not having to rely exclusively on client project work to earn a living.

Outside of Jam, James has spent a bit of time working on adding the ability for customers to purchase multiple patches in a single order on mission-patch.com, and on investigating a potential problem in Mocha as he prepares for the release of v3.0.0. And we all met in London yesterday to have lunch with James Darling and to spend the afternoon together to generally catch up over a couple of pints.

Until next time.

– Chris