Week 841

Week beginning Monday, 24th February 2025. And actually most of February as we’ve missed the previous 3 weeks too.

We’re now in the 4th sprint of our current project with the Raspberry Pi Foundation. Quite a lot of our time and energy in the first three sprints was spent on understanding requirements, exploring various technical approaches and discussing our approach to software/product development. Although not always easy I think the hard work and conversations have paid off and we now have a good shared idea in the wider team of what we’re building. I’ve found it refreshing to start discarding some of our exploratory spikes and start replacing it with well tested production-ready code.

We booked a meeting room near Euston to spend a day working together with Leigh and Mariam in the product team which I really enjoyed. Despite all the improvements in remote working tools I still don’t think you can beat all being in the same room together sometimes. We booked through London Meeting Rooms which provided us with a good-sized meeting room for a very reasonable day rate in the St Giles International building on Southampton Row. I can recommend it if you’re looking for somewhere to work.

We haven’t been pairing/mobbing quite so much over the past 3 weeks while we each tackled a different aspect of the project. James and I have been exploring/spiking on different technical challenges while Chris has been taking some initial design ideas from Mariam and turning them into beautiful HTML + CSS. I think this was probably the right choice but I do miss the social aspect when we’re all working independently.

In other (non-RPF news) from the past 3 weeks:

I’m writing a blog post about deploying Rails 8 apps to Digital Ocean with Kamal. The post is finished but I’m now fighting with our website to get it rendered correctly.

I received my new StarBook laptop. It replaces a 4ish year old Star Labs LabTop and so far I’m really pleased with it.

James has been spending time working on Mocha, prompted by renewed interest from previous collaborator Nitish.

Chris hosted the well attended February meeting of LRUG lightning talks at Funding Circle’s offices.

James discovered that it was possible for one of his neighbours to accidentally cancel his broadband contract when they signed up with the incorrect address! He’s currently making do with a 4G wireless router until his broadband is reconnected in early March.

James delivered what I understand to be a well received talk at Yarmouth Sailing Club about his time working for the British Antarctic Survey in Antarctica. Well done, James!

Until next time.

– Chris