Week 574

Week commencing 13 Jan 2020.

• I started writing a 2019 in review blog post. Which I’ll publish soon.

• Chris hosted LRUG on Monday night and has been getting involved in discussions about CoTech voting, and in administering the CoTech bank account.

• Ben’s been experimenting with using AWS to build something that makes it really easy to display big numbers on a webpage (i.e. a super simple dashboard). There are plenty of dashboard apps available but they all do a bit too much.

• James continued to work on glueing together various bits of AWS to automate some of our regular admin tasks. He’s been investigating cheaper alternatives to using a (relatively expensive) NAT Gateway for the ScheduledFargateTask constructs in the CDK.

• We were joined by In Fact coop for lunch. They’re graduates of Founders & Coders, have been working together for a couple of years and are part of CoTech. We discussed the idea of some kind of skill sharing sessions so I’ll be interested to see what comes of that.

• James M has been pairing with James T from The Audience Agency. James T is currently taking a Rails course with Le Wagon and I can’t think of anyone better than James M to help him get some on-the-job experience.

• Chris added a feature to the Audience Agency app that allows venues to visualise their catchment area on a map. This was positively received and gives us a great base to build on to help venues better attract new audiences. Great work, Chris!

• Chris and I did some remote pairing during the week. We used Slack’s call and screenshare functionality which worked quite well. It’s been a while since I’ve done any remote pairing and I’d forgotten how useful/enjoyable it can be.

• We finished the week on a high, with a limited release of the new Audience Agency app to a subset of their users. I think the goal of releasing to some real users helped focus us during the sprint, and I hope it’ll help us prioritise work from now on. We’ve already ordered some celebratory mission patches :-)