Week 1

Intro

A fresh year.

I often get to the end of a week or sprint and have only partial recollection of the things that have gone on. It feels like I've been busy but I draw a blank when filling in timesheet, or submitting work weeknotes. So, I'm going got try to write my own, personal weeknotes.

Rules

• They might be sparse and just a list
• It's OK if they're late (I'm tidying these notes up near the end of Jan)
• They must be posted in order

Planning

I organised a planning session for the year ahead in the team-within-team I work in. It went well, and I enjoyed thinking about how to structure something like that and how to understand the things that we're committed to delivering by a deadline and how to make space for other things we want to do.

I wouldn’t want to do it all the time but it was nice to think about bringing order to things. There’s so much we want to do and not enough time/people to do all of it.

Also, I got to use Illustrator which I recently got to make a massive chart with squares that could fit a single post-it on. Template is here and picture of it here.

Magic magic button

When building the Magic Button app the physical magic button on the device, which is user-assignable, never got done. I'm currently working on doing that. The initial version involves, moving as much from HTTP API routes as possible and into a central object that can be triggered from the physical UI code too. Got an initial version done and waiting for a code review before continuing with the other one.

Skeleton app

A few people have got in touch wanting to try out or docs for Radiodan. Every person wants something slightly different. There isn't an easy way of getting started on a computer, as we've focussed on getting started with theRaspberry Pi. I wrote self-contained skeleton app, aiming to be as simple to start with as git clone, npm install and npm start to run it. It includes a basic example of doing something from node.js and via the web API.