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It’s a lovely clear blue Monday morning in London. But we’re struggling a little with the Microblogging project and we think we could usefully spend some time getting a clear and common understanding of the requirements and data sources. There’s a man drilling into the office now, but then I think we turn a corner and agree that there are really two distinct projects within Microblogging; it separates neatly (as it should) into a reusable ingest chain and a user-facing application built on top.

We need to get better at managing our flow of work, there’s a little gap in April before some big projects kick off so we’re working out how to fill it. Possibly with some process and outreach work, I know that doesn’t sound that exciting but we have some ideas.

On Tuesday afternoon it’s the final presentation of Resolver to Audio & Music, everyone is agreed it’s a great piece of work and it seems to answer all our questions. Afterwards we think about how this might continue, some possible internal routes and some more open and wider routes. Lots to ponder.

Bookcase update: We’ve now received a floor plan showing the proposed location of said bookcase which requires our approval.

The Microblogging ingest chain ran overnight on Wednesday with no problems, just a couple of connections dropped by the proxy but all recoverable. It’s getting approximately 100 messages a second and we consumed 3 million messages overall. This is giving us some really interesting scaling and messaging work.

Thursday morning kicks off with a good discussion with everyone about our new project ideas; we cross off some of the legacy ones off and Chris B adds a new one. We’ve set a deadline of Easter for new ideas. We’ll then spend a couple of weeks assessing and discussing them, iterating down to a prioritised list we’re happy with. We’re also thinking about our because it’s not really working. We decide we’re going to trial an online equivalent for task management (any suggestions in the comments please), probably a very simple system with a backlog, tasks in progress and tasks done. Cookies in the office today. And there’s an incident with a microwave.

Coventry now has the full project team of two engineers and one designer on it, we’ve got the code framework in place and we’re sorting out the page layout and design. I’m sorting terms and conditions with the data sources and I think we’re on track to make this one live in a couple of weeks. The only dip in this project right now is that we really want it to include some playable music but we’re not sure how right now. At the end of the day Chris G has a conference call with R&D North about an idea they’re proposing for the upcoming election. It’s really interesting but we’re too busy to help at such short notice.

So this week; a few people are out of the office using up their annual leave, sporadic drilling in the neighbouring lift shaft, more clarity around the Microblogging project, really starting to get somewhere with Coventry, a general trend to early starts in the morning and Sean has wrapped up the Presence project. Good progress.