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Notes from the Week #26

20 Jul 2019

weeknotes gds

Wowee! I did a lot this week, so I’m looking forward to spending a nice slow weekend, interspersed with various code-y things.

  • I was in Bath for the Democracy Club summer meeting. Despite failing to put on sun-cream, and acquiring what a friend calls “star damage”, it was a really interesting event. Among the heavy questions being asked were things like “What’s our vision?” and “If someone else came along to take this off our hands, would we be happy? If not, why?”.

  • A significant portion of the discussions had us thinking about search - both making ourselves more visible, and ensuring we’re ready for the shift towards voice search (I know a few older people who only use voice search on their phones rather than typing queries).

  • This led me down a bit of a rabbit-hole learning about schema.org and linked data. Which is cool! One of my ambitions for this year was to learn more things about open data and linked data. I’ll soon be tagging up my blog with JSON-LD as a learning exercise.

  • Tuesday was my session at XTC - Mental Health in Software Development. I think it went well, the people who attended seemed to enjoy it and there was a lot of shared perspective - I’m glad I was able to create an environment where the participants felt able to share their own anecdotes on the topic!

  • There’s a much bigger post coming as a write-up of my XTC session (there’s a thick wedge of post-its sitting on my side-table right now), but despite feeling the urge to be sick due to nerves, I’m going to chalk this one up as a success. XTC is a great community, and the small group-discussion format is highly underrated in the software development meetup space.

  • We’ve started discussions on SLx in our team at work. I’m not directly facilitating the conversation or sessions, but I’m glad to be able to share my experiences from setting up SLx on our graphite system at Unruly. It’s tricky to dig down and think about “Well, what indicators are actually good proxies for how users interact with the system?”.

  • I’m intending to kick-off my own workshop/dojo on gardening and refactoring. There appears to appetite, and it’ll be great to share some ways we could improve our code-bases.

Listening/Reading/Watching