Go Free Range Blog

week-161

2012-02-22T08:34:00+00:00

Wednesday 22nd February

by Jason Cale

Week 161

Hello folks.

This is my tardiest report, late to the table, the editor at my throat.

Whitehall handover

Week 161 was our second week of the Whitehall app handover. We’ve been radically stripping back the user interface and beginning to build it back up with a look and feel that is closer to the Citizen site. In doing this, we were exposed with sharpened focus to the difficulties present in creating an intuitive map of government structure and activities.

It became clear that it was not just a matter of changing a few colours; we had not yet addressed some of the more subtle aspects of our challenge, and this left me a little concerned. After all I’d been partly responsible for trying to lay the foundation that this design activity would be using.

Having reflected on this, my thoughts came back to where I had been before the handover began; this work we are doing now is just where we’re at in the development process.

We had gotten most of the functionality and content together, our site was functionally done enough to allow us to simmer, reduce and refine the message. A complex mix of ingredients, once assembled, needs to be formed into a simple unified experience. But that it is still a lot of work.

The timing of this work, with the notion of an arbitrary deadline and the handover to the core GDS team has created a situation which perhaps is a little more strained than it ought to be. But the team is working well, and I anticipate it all coming good.

I’m very thankful for the way we have built the software: it is well tested and engineered, so that this change can be handled with confidence.

I also got chance this week to make some commits to the Citizen codebase, in order to help get some of the elements we share between projects, to act responsively — to fit with our approach — using a mobile-first fluid and collapsable grid to align content easily over different display sizes.

Capistrano Rsync Bug Fix

James M fixed a bug which was happening with the GovUK capistrano_rsync_with_remote_cache library which will now make the deployment fail fast if any system command returns an error code. Nice.

Rolling the Pay

With our handover happening we’ve individually had a little bit of time away from the GovUK project to deal with whatever we wish. A chance to take a breather, and to attend to those little details which have been de-prioritised over the last few months.

At GFR we chose to deal with our Payroll ourselves, and naturally we’ve made a few mistakes along the way as we learn.

One slight snag we’ve had is inconsistent dates between the payslips generated in our accounting software (FreeAgent) and those in HMRC’s Basic PAYE Tools, this was perpetuated by a bug in FreeAgent which meant we couldn’t change and regenerate our payslips without causing some complications in how our personal remuneration via salary and dividends are accounted for.

Chris decided to fix this, believing that the FreeAgent bug had now been fixed, and so went through all of the last two years of payslips, regenerating them both in FreeAgent and in the HMRC payroll calculator with his usual incredible attention to detail.

The upshot of which is we now have all have correct and consistent payroll information, and because it was Chris, we also have a thorough description of all the steps taken and screenshots of the before and after states of his changes in FreeAgent to show that everything worked as intended.

As I don’t really understand all this stuff, I’m very grateful that Chris does and has persevered with what sounds like a massively complex and boring task.

Blimey.

The little printer

James A has been spending some of his free time iterating on his open source thermal printer project. He has managed to get graphics printing working to a sweet standard, and is, I believe, at present printing the graphics with data transferred from an SD card.

The next step (which James is now working on) is to allow data to be pushing to it over a network, which will mean that once the little bugger is connected, you could print with it using HTTP. Exciting stuff, I’m sure your mind can wander over the possibilities.

Until next time

Check back next week (actually, later this week) for the next instalment.

JC.

Recent

week-160

2012-02-12T21:00:00+00:00

Sunday 12th February

by James Mead

Week 160

In her never-ending battle against the increase of entropy and the accumulation of kipple, Harmonia has decreed that I should once again note the week. Despite having tended Harmonia’s wounds, it looks like I jinxed matters with last week’s comments about the unpredictability of randomness. Anyway here goes…

Handover

This week we’ve started to handover the Whitehall app to some of our colleagues from the Citizen team now that their public release is out of the way. In a typical IT project handover, the project grinds to a halt while the outgoing team writes wads of documentation before departing abruptly and leaving the incoming team to pick up the pieces. However, we aim to tackle a handover in a more collaborative and iterative manner. And to this end we’ve spent some time this week helping our new team-mates get up to speed. It’s great to see how quickly they’re picking things up and Paul lifted our spirits by patching rake so we can run our tests faster using Ruby v1.9.3.

It’s always tricky keeping a project moving forward while changing the makeup of its team and I think progress on the project has faltered a bit this week due to a shortage of GDS developer time. Happily this looks to have been addressed and the project should be back up to full speed in the coming week. It certainly helps that the Whitehall app is already integrated into the GovUK ecosystem and that we have comprehensive suites of automated tests which can act both to prevent regression and as living documentation.

Jase also deserves a lot of kudos for the way he’s applied “just enough design” at every stage of the project. This means the app isn’t now weighed down with too much design baggage and is in great shape for bringing into line with the latest look & feel of the citizen-facing site. Jase has also made further progress in his mission to make the site design thoroughly responsive.

Public release

This week has also seen a welcome influx of writers and editors from across government, such that the Whitehall team now forms two serried ranks amidst the hot-desking mêlée at Aviation House. It’s really good to have these folk on-site and able to give us direct feedback on what we’ve built and great to see new content on the site bringing it to life. Although internally we’re always releasing, the imminent public release of the Whitehall app has been focussing minds on story prioritisation.

In other news

Our accountant started finalising our end-of-year accounts and asked us to work out the value of our work in progress. James did an admirable job of figuring out what that meant and came up with the necessary numbers. I fiddled about with (and tried not to curse) the HMRC Basic PAYE Tool in order to apply some new tax codes. It looks like Tom has given recap a bit more love and James has converted this site to use it for deployment. I fixed one bug in mocha only to discover that I’d caused a more serious one. During the week I played with #blue for the first time in a while and was impressed how snappy it was - thanks to the recent work by Chris, Tom and the O2 gang.

On Wednesday we managed to get the whole company together for a pancake lunch at My Old Dutch on High Holborn. As we slowly reduce our involvement with the Whitehall app and our friends at GDS, we’re hoping to carve out some time in between client work to think more about what direction we should take with Go Free Range in the months ahead. In particular we’ve always thought we’d like to build some products of our own, partly for fun and partly to develop alternative revenue streams. Interesting times!

Hasta la vista.

— James.

Recent

sometimes-success-means-not-building-software

2012-02-06T15:17:52+00:00

Thursday 18th November

by James Adam

Sometimes success means not building software

We build software because we enjoy doing it, but that’s not the most important thing when you’re in a software business.

It’s easy to forget this simple truth: clients don’t pay us because they want software; they are hoping that software can help them become more effective as a business. Any software we produce is just a tool, an artefact that we hope will make it easier for their business to operate.

Their goal isn’t to “have” some software, it’s to get the most value out of their budget. And sometimes building new software isn’t the best way to help them do that.

A prospective project

We had an excellent meeting this week with a potential new client with an existing software system. Let’s call him Dave.¹

Dave had some concerns about their existing software, written in Java, and wanted to discuss rebuilding it. He felt that things took too long to build in Java, and had heard good things about rapid development with Ruby on Rails.

Dave’s principle investor, who had tagged along for the meeting, described the software as “a soldier, covered in plasters and patches”. You get the idea - it works, but it’s not pretty and there’s some concern about how long it might survive.

Once the business domain was stripped away, the system wasn’t particularly complicated and the work wouldn’t be particularly hard.

The bottom line: undertaking this project could represent a fairly easy source of income for our company. We could easily start pitching Rails and our team, win the project, and keep our cash-flow nice and rosy. That’s the best thing for our business, right?

Thankfully, that is not how we work at Free Range.

What is the actual problem?

After discussing the business and software for some time with Dave and his investor, we discovered that the issues they were feeling had little to do with the existing system, or any of the apparent benefits they might get if it were built in a different language.

Instead, their real pain was with their existing developer, who was a lone contractor with less-than-ideal responsiveness and some development practices that could be improved. He was hard to reach and unpredictable; features that they thought would take weeks sometimes only took days, whereas others that seemed simple took weeks.

Even when software was delivered, they felt it was the “beginning of the end”, rather than the “end of the end”, as they laboured to manually test the change and its interaction with the existing functionality.²

Pace was just too slow. The developer had quoted six months of work for some changes they wanted to make, and when this combined with their existing frustration, their confidence had dropped sufficiently that they came to us.

How can we help?

We helped Dave and his partner understand that the programming language used has far less influence on delivery of value than how the development is actually performed. A good set of developers will be able to deliver features at a reasonable pace regardless of the underlying technology choices.³

We believe that, as appealing as The Great Rewrite often is, it’s very rarely the right thing to do. It’s almost never the right thing to do when you need to pay for it.

We outlined some iterative development strategies that would allow us to improve their software without a big bang replacement, but the truth is that they already have a working system in Java that, despite its problems, helps them operate their business today.

So, instead of discussing the specifics of the project further, we helped them get in touch with reputable Java shops that might be able to take the existing codebase and heal its wounds. They’ll be able to get second opinions about how difficult it might be “heal the soldier” properly and get them back on track.

If, for whatever reason, the consensus of those opinions is that a rewrite is unavoidable, then we’d be delighted to continue exploring specifics with them.

Success!

Despite having no project at the end of the meeting, Dave and his investor left happy and more confident. We received an email later in the day:

Thank you very much for the help!

I wish I was in a situation that would allow me to work with you guys. Your honest and knowledgeable advice was very helpful. Should it transpire that things are so bad that a rebuild would be the right direction to go in I’ll be sure to drop you a line.

For us, this represents a tangible success. And if anyone asks Dave where to take a project that might involve software, we think he’ll remember us. And in our business, word of mouth and reputation are just as valuable as invoices.

Of course, his name wasn’t Dave, but talking about “The client” for the rest of this post gets boring real fast.↩
Of course, there are often quite legitimate reasons for the unpredictability of pace in software development, but the key to managing this is frequent, high-quality communication followed by the ability to re-scope work. If your developer disappears for a week, this is impossible.↩
Chances are that a good set of developers will have actually made technology choices that help them deliver features at a reasonable pace.↩

Recent

week-159

2012-02-05T23:37:00+00:00

Sunday 05th February

by James Mead

Week 159

Somewhere in Brazil a butterfly flapped its wings and the great goddess, Harmonia, chose me to write the week-notes this week. Although she’s nominated me plenty of times for other company tasks, in an almost petulant demonstration of the unpredictability of randomness, this is the first time she’s picked me to note the week.

Gov UK

Having completed our work on #blue with O2, the whole team was back at Aviation House this week working on the Whitehall-facing part of the government single domain project. The big event of the week was undoubtably the release of the beta version of the citizen-facing part of the project. We offer hearty congratulations to our comrades in the citizen team.

It feels really positive that such a high-profile government IT project is being delivered in an incremental and iterative way using an open source stack and very refreshing that it’s already adapting in response to user feedback. We’d really encourage everyone to take the new site for a spin. The buzz in the office and all the positive media coverage has certainly injected extra enthusiasm for getting the Whitehall app ready for release.

Whitehall

Now that more real content is being added to the system, Jase has been working hard to iterate on the design and make things more consistent across the site. Neil and Pete continue to marshall stories as well as throngs of writers across government who are busy entering data into the system. The Whitehall app aims to put government policy centre stage, but one challenge that Neil and his posse face is that there is no single clear definition of what constitutes government policy.

This week we bade farewell (or hopefully only au revoir) to Tom S who has been a very welcome addition to the GFR team for the last few weeks. We wish him good luck in his new ventures and hope we get the chance to work with him again in the future. We’re also looking forward to working more closely with members of the citizen team, now that their release is out the way, as we begin to handover development of the app to those with a more permanent association with the Government Digital Service.

The week was nicely rounded off by our first Github pull request from a member of the public. May there be many more!

In other news

It looks like James A has renewed his interest in persuading his computer to talk to very small printers - I only hope Timmy isn’t too jealous. Jase has somehow found time amidst his copious ceramic throwing to put together an EP. I’ve been trying, but failing, to keep up with a recent surge of interest in mocha. I’m curious whether this burst of activity has anything to do with the renewed interest in using a more object-oriented approach to developing Rails apps. Tom W managed to wrestle Go Free Range’s Annual Return into submission (to Companies House) and Chris continued to astound me with his incredible attention to detail.

Adieu.

— James.

Recent

week-158

2012-01-28T13:37:00+00:00

Saturday 28th January

by James Adam

Week 158

I’ve already written this week about my experiences remote working, but it’s weeknotes time and I know you won’t be happy without them, so, well, here they are.

Happy now?

Rundown

This was the second of two flat-out weeks for Free Range. It’s fair to say that everyone is looking forward to a bit more free time in February.

Whitehall

Progress continues apace with the development of the “corporate” slice of the single domain project, and it was the second week of working with Tom Stuart, who has taken almost no time to get up to speed and is steadily delivering new features.

It’s been particularly interesting to get the perspective of another developer on a project you’ve been building for a while; Tom has definitely been shining light into some of the less desirable nooks and crannies of the software and helping us clean them up. He’s also been asking great questions about which of a set of implementation options is the “Free Range preferred way”, which has given a few of us pause for thought about how we might improve and clarify our shared approach to software architecture.

Responsive Design

One aspect of single domain development we’re proud to have been a part of is the introduction of responsive design (which you may also have heard of under the guise of progressive enhancement or mobile-first). In a nutshell, rather than providing separate implementations for devices with different capabilities (such as the small screens on mobile phones), one design can adapt as the capabilities of the display device change. You can read more about this on the GDS blog.

Jase introduced responsive design to the Whitehall templates very early on, and next week he’ll be helping bring other parts of the shared template into line. He’ll also be posting on the GDS blog himself in the near future.

Hashblue

Meanwhile at GFR HQ, Tom and Chris finished the second of two weeks working with O2 to improve the performance of some of the Hashblue infrastructure to support more concurrent users. It’s been an intense two weeks for them, although it’s still a project that is close to our hearts. One of the project goals was to build iteratively using real customer feedback, and so it’s always good to do whatever gets it into the hands of as many real customers as possible.

The Queen Bee Is Dead

Jase went to Bristol on Wednesday to talk again about working without leaders with the Bristol Usability Group. This is the second time Jason has presented about some of the alternative choices we’ve made about how our company works, and it was extremely well received:

It's a shame that I didn't get a chance to talk to @jasoncale after his inspirational talk last night at BUG.
— Chui Chui Tan (@ChuiSquared) January 26, 2012

Love that @freerange's chaos administrator software (to randomly assign tedious tasks) has a female identity. github.com/freerange/harm…
— Basheera Khan (@Bash) January 25, 2012

Here are Jase’s beautiful slides, although they only give a flavour of his talk on their own.

Jase was even approached by other people asking how they might transform their own loose networks of colleagues into Free Range-like groups, which is both very flattering and quite frightening at the same time, since we still feel a bit like explorers mapping uncharted organisational territory¹ ourselves.

We have had some thoughts about recording a version of Jason’s talk suitable for sharing on the web, but additionally attemping an internal project where we all give presentations on this theme to each other. This is one of the many things that we might pick up during our “Spring Break”.

Miscellany

I have been thinking about motivation², Harmonia, and how the dynamics in our company might be scarily close to those in a flat-share. Applying Harmonia to tasks which require creativity might require a different approach to tasks that are simply rote work. I’ll keep thinking about it.

Finally, it was great to see this tweet from Gabe, the lead developer for MUBI:

Appreciating some code we hired @tomafro and @freerange to write months ago.Still paying dividends!
— Gabe da Silveira (@dasil003) January 24, 2012

That’s all, folks.

— James

Of course, we’re not, but we often feel like we are.↩
Some of this talk isn’t directly relevant since Harmonia doesn’t incentivise financially, but much of the presentation is still interesting and very relevant: Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose.↩

Recent

working-remotely

2012-01-25T00:05:00+00:00

Wednesday 25th January

by James Adam

Working Remotely

There’s no point accepting the burden of being your own boss if you don’t actually take advantage of the perks. And one of those perks is not being bound to any particular schedule, least of all nine-to-five at the same desk for 48 weeks in the year. For the last month I took advantage by working from two distinct remote locations: Aberdeen¹ and Austin².

Working remotely is a four dimensional problem, so first let’s consider the first three: space.

The Northern Lights…

Working from Aberdeen is only marginally different from working from home; it’s just a question of geography.

In case you’ve never had the pleasure of doing so, allow me to outline the principle benefits of working out of the office:

If you’re not being productive, you can take a break and do something different.
If you are being productive, there are (probably) fewer people around to disrupt your flow.
If you get hungry you can fetch a snack with your entire kitchen at your disposal.
You can work in your underwear. Lying to you about this is not doing you any favours anymore.

Some of those benefits are the yin to their own yang. Because it’s easy to take a break when you’re not being productive, it’s easy to use that as an excuse to avoid even trying to be productive. The same goes for the kitchen (and it’s worse with all the delicious food that’s around over Christmas!).

But the biggest problem of all is that communication gets harder. Much harder.

Ill Communication

We use a group chat tool, and are signed into it almost all the time, but it doesn’t work passively. Even with the most diligent colleagues in the world, they aren’t sitting awaiting your next dispatch, and it’s not surprising that sometimes a question goes for five or ten minutes without answer.

What compounds this is that you don’t know if they really are busy, or if they’re discussing your question in, y’know, the “real” world, or if they’ve read it and are just ignoring it. Working remotely is not for the paranoid.

You also miss out on any of the spontaneous conversations that might happen in the “real” world³, which may or may not get summarised over email or chat. If pair programming is an intense tool for spreading knowledge about software, spontaneous conversations are transient ultra-pairing that spreads knowledge about the company.

Not even a new problem

James M already knows all about this; not living in London, he’s worked remotely on a reasonably regular basis for years now.

I’m sure that pair programming (among other things) helps the remote worker feel a bit more connected to the rest of the company, but it’s not a rich conduit for all the other communication that might be going on, from ambient glances⁴ to actual in-depth discussions.

We’ve experimented with a few tools to ameliorate this issue, including having a constant Skype connection open, but nothing has really stuck. At the moment, we have a camera in the office⁵ which allows the remote Free Ranger⁶ to at least see if there’s anyone in the office to get hold off, and limited ability to overhear what they might be talking about, but it’s still very much one-way. If you want get someone’s attention, you’re relying on their periodic attention to the group chat. It’s not great and I’m really interested in what we can do to improve this.

What do to about it?

Perhaps this is simply the Law of the Instrument in operation, but I feel like there’s a reasonably lightweight software solution to this, potentially augmented by a bit of hardware for serious attention grabbing. My colleagues will not be surprised to hear that I think it would be quite simple to build this using Project Codename: PissWhistle⁷. Perhaps we’ll find out in the next few months.

What remains is the fourth dimension: time.

The Stars At Night, Are Big And Bright…

Working from Austin is not like working from Aberdeen, because now we have the smug whimsy of The Sun And Its Incessant Rotation Around The Earth to reckon with. No matter how long you spend shaking your skinny fist at that irrepressible ball of fire, it’s not going to rise in Austin at the same time as it does in London.

When I’m in Austin, I start work just as you are wiping the afternoon tea’s clotted cream from your chin. I’ve just finished breakfast and you’re already thinking about dinner. I’m getting up to speed with the day’s work while you are winding down, day-dreaming about a tepid, nut-brown ale… You get the idea.

In many ways this situation is similar to remote working from the same timezone, with each challenge only slightly magnified. Communication is harder because now it’s actually very likely that nobody is around. The temptation to slack off is easier to indulge because, similarly, there’s nobody even in the group chat to notice that you’re not working. The kitchen is even more tempting because the food in Austin is freaking delicious!

And it was 23° in January. At the start of January. Try sitting in front of a laptop while that meteorological paradox plays out on your outside deck.

Qualitative shift

However, it’s possible the exacerbation of those conditions is actually useful, because it prompts a qualitative shift in the interaction. Rather than wondering why nobody is replying to a question, I don’t go to that tool as often, but use email instead, anticipating a response the next morning⁸.

During the couple of hours which did overlap, I think I made better use of; for example, focussing on emails whose responses required input from other people, or discussing higher-level aspects of our projects and leads. It’s also possible that the people in London also shifted their behaviour slightly and were, perhaps, more responsive during that window of overlap than they might otherwise have been. I’m curious if this was real, or just my perception.

Stop… Hypothesis time

I have a hypothesis (well, many, but here’s one) about one aspect of how our group dynamic operates, and I think it’s relevant here.

Because nobody is “in charge”, and because we all directly involved in building the software our clients pay for, it’s normal that everyone is working away quietly to develop some feature or other. After all, that’s what we are being paid to do, and that’s more or less where our passion lies. We didn’t get into this to manage projects or juggle cash-flows, after all.

But as you pause, having completed a piece of work or other, the perception that others are still working makes you feel like what you ought to do is pick up the next feature and get to work on it. After all, our principle goal is to build this system, and so manifesting that in a text editor is the most appropriate use of time.

I believe there are two assumed principles in operation here:

Everyone else is busy, so I should be busy too.
Emitting software artefacts is the most important thing to be doing.

These form a subtle feedback loop of sorts, which conspire against doing anything that isn’t a part of the flow of building software. This includes the obviously uninteresting chores like invoicing, VAT returns, and so on, but also impacts dealing with clients and leads, and making decisions about the company in general. I find this interesting enough to want to leave exploring it for another occasion⁹, but I bring it up now because I suspect something similar operates when people are working remotely.

I believe that there is an implicit assumption that if I’m OK, You’re OK, and that if I am working away without any worries in the office, then you are probably happily working away wherever you are too.

There’s no way text-based chat allows us to pick on the concerned expression which would otherwise prompt stepping away from the coalface. It’s just not a very rich communication channel.

Anyway

These are just a few thoughts that I’ve been bouncing around. As I’ve said before, remote working is always going to be a part of the way we work here at Giant Frock Romp, so it’s always going to be worthwhile exploring how it works and how we might improve it.

I’m back again on Friday with the weeknotes, so I’ll leave this there for now.

Adieu, blogfolk!

– James

Familial home; see week-153 ↩
Current location of my other half; see week-154 ↩
Every time I type this, reader, I’m resisting the urge to type “meatspace”. I just want you to know that.↩
I’m always reminded of the Glances application that Matt Webb made, but I’m never sure if it would really help. Here’s his presentation about it in case that gives more context.↩
It’s a Y-cam White S which streams audio as well as video. The quality of either is… passable.↩
This term is not in vogue, and I cannot be held responsible for the consequences of using it.↩
I’m sorry about the name, but in my defence, I am unable to help myself and cannot be held responsible for my own behaviour in the case of software naming.↩
… along with around sixty other emails. I think it’s fair to say that gov.uk are all big users of email. Ahem.↩
… and it’s possible that I’m the only one who does, and that anything which distracts from programming really is less important. But my intuition is that understanding and working to resolve these things will be tangible help when trying to build a solid foundation for the kind of company that we’re trying to run.↩

Recent

week-157

2012-01-20T17:45:00+00:00

Friday 20th January

by Jason Cale

Week 157

Hello my dears, here are the notable experiences for our last week.

Gov UK

On Wednesday myself and Neil spoke with some of the team responsible for the DirectGov mobile site. They wanted to know how we could continue providing a mobile experience once the new platform goes live.

From day one we decided it would be a good idea to go ‘mobile first’ adding media queries to the site’s stylesheets to enrich and unfold the layout when viewed on increasingly bigger screens.

This also means that the default is mobile friendly; a simple single column layout that should behave fairly sensible on mobile devices, and any older browsers that don’t have support for media queries baked in.

Our actual implementation is probably cause for another article, but I’m pretty happy we decided to do this from the get go. The team from DirectGov were very happy that we had answered all their potential questions and MOST IMPORTANT OF ALL we did so with real working software already out in the (http auth protected) wild. Boom fo’ real. Yeah, Yeah, Yeah.

O2 & #blue

Tom and Chris spent the week in our office entertaining Rich, Kev and Karl from O2 Labs. Working on improving the load handling ability of the super cute conversation keeper #blue.

We have been tasked with helping scale the infrastructure up as part of a larger O2 project that is super hush hush at the moment, but dependent on #blue to make it extra honey.

They spent the week discussing and implementing various approaches, subjecting each one to deep scientific performance tests and weighing up the results.

We even borrowed some of the computational firepower from CERN to hit it hard. It passed with flying colours, so we helped them find some Higgs bosons which had been nested in between some dirty text messages.

Chaos Returns

For some extra brownie points a few weeks ago I decided to contribute some code to our bad ass Chaos Administrator, the mighty vixen Harmonia .

We needed to do our annual return, so I had a quick word with her, and low and behold on Monday she appointed Tom to sort it out big style.

As I writing the implementation I realised I had no actual idea what submitting our annual return involved so the email which Harmonia would send out was fairly vague and asked for exploration.

Once the task has been tackled, we can document the steps needed to submit the return inside our own software (by updating the email template) for next year when it will be assigned to someone again.

This is a great way of accumulating knowledge. If we bake it into our code it not only enables us to easily automate some of our admin flimflam but it’s in a place which we feel comfortable; in the blooming source code, shared freely for the whole world to see.

Remote working

James A’s good lady Roz moved to Austin mid-last year to undertake a postdoctoral position after finishing her PhD (high-fives) here in London. I’d have to let James fill in the details of what Roz is actually doing because I’m just an idiot with a paintbrush in black yoga hotpants.

Consequently James has periodically been working under the sunny Texan skies whilst we shiver and age within the cruel grey London discontent (I’m perpetually cold, hence my penchant for yoga in a 40° room).

This is an interesting and relevant situation for how we steer the GFR ship whilst fabricating the hull in the middle of the ocean. Once we have discussed and reflected, hammered in a few more nails etc, James intends to write up our thoughts and solutions for how this might work long term.

New Adventures

On wednesday evening I took the train up to Nottingham for second installation of Simon & Greg’s super bad ass conference New Adventures (in web design).

It was good to see old friends and hear in more detail what people have been up to, especially as I took a break from the conference circuit in 2011 to try and figure out why I actually go to conferences.

The actual day was true to the good form established in the first incarnation last January. I was engaged and bewildered, often in agreement and sometimes not so much.

I’m glad I went, but the real juice of the experience as ever was afterwards; chewing the fat, getting intimate over an pineapple juice or two.

Bristol Usability Group

Ok, so this is in fact a note about the expected future.

But, if any of you folks are in Bristol this coming Wednesday I’m giving a talk on our leaderless revolution for the good folks at the Bristol Usability Group, come say hello and give me a hug.

Laters

Week 158 is set to be a jam-packed donut, so I best opt for that restorative consciousness commonly know as sleepytime.

Until I’m randomly picked to write you a story once more…

Recent

week-156

2012-01-14T09:45:00+00:00

Saturday 14th January

by Jason Cale

Week 156

Things are heating up on the GovUK project as we ascend towards getting our application ready to be shared with the public in the coming months.

We’ve gotten most of the underlying tools and architecture built and are now primarily developing and refining the central experience which will make up the Government Corporate website-of-all-websites.

To assist with this strengthening of focus we now have product owner Neil Williams’ full time devoted to getting this bad boy out in the open, as he had his last day at BIS on Wednesday.

Having a product owner around every day to engage with is one of the core tenets of a good agile team, especially when we are needing to really pin down what is important in the run up to the beta going public.

That said, Neil has been excellent in keeping things running whilst holding down two jobs, so if anything this should just make things a little easier for Neil, and I hope he enjoys being able to enjoy the space left from relinquishing his other responsibilities a little.

Following good news with good news, our man from upstairs Ross Ferguson is joining us a few more days a week from the Foreign Office before becoming full time in May.

Ross is helping us out with developing the international elements the website, he knows his onions from his coconuts.

A guilty pleasure of mine is the joy of having Ross’ robust Scottish accent in the office and as James’ isn’t very convincing these days, I’m hoping that it re-flower with Ross around the office to offer encouragement.

Our Herlihyarious project manager Pete, has pretty much nailed my West Midlands drone which he oh too kindly offers up in dulcet lamentations whenever I’m looking tormented.

The accent part of this weeks note comes to an end.

Most of my torment has come from struggling to get design elements bubbling up and out into some form of ‘completion’. Our team is moving so quickly that my preference to do no upfront design and allow the UI to evolve organically in the browser dependent on real content / functionality has caused me to be a bottle neck.

This I think is due to visibility of my intent being stuck in my head as I’m too busy creating instead of directing the creative approach.

In light of this I’ve planned some time to step back for a few breaths to outline the overall creative approach for everyones reference.

Sharing this with everyone to iterate on should allow us to collectively understand and move towards where we should be heading. Maybe then I can focus on the fine details which will really make the UI sing.

Whilst there is frustration, I do find this process really interesting as well as humbling. In hindsight the spectrum of no-upfront through full upfront interface design work should be viewed as such.

Having dialled my working practice towards doing nothing upfront was a little too extreme. Coming back towards some (continuously refined) upfront work should make for a more pleasurable experience and follows advice I’m actively trying to live by ….

Here lies the joy of our process, every day is new with the chance to move towards something that works when we realise something isn’t working out so well.

Up into the clouds

It was mentioned briefly before that we are going to be working with O2 again. This week Chris and myself met with some of their crew to discuss what was needed to help them over the next few weeks.

Come monday Chris and Tom will looking at scaling up #blue further for an impending flood of activity from some top secret O2 project.

Hello, Tom Stuart

Getting involved with O2 for a few iterations will mean our team is a bit squeezed for time, and we like to keep it on the big easy. So in order to keep our delivery pipe of infinite doom open and spraying into our clients’ faces, we have asked GFR friend and honorary sometime office dweller Tom Stuart to help us out for a few weeks on the GovUK project.

Tom has already worked on the Citizen side, and we know that he is really really good. So we are looking forward to seeing how we can work with and learn new things together.

Collaborating with people outside of our little bubble tends to have a mirror holding effect, which is really useful when you care about refining how a group can work together to achieve something better than the day before.

My mind is empty, so with big love I will bid thee adieu, — Jase.

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2011-12-30T11:15:00+00:00

Friday 30th December

by James Adam

Week 154

If you were impressed that Week 153 came all the way from Scotland, then you better make sure you are seated, because week 154 comes to you from around 11 kilometres in the air above Kentucky. Whoever Harmonia assigns next week is probably going to have to get friendly with Richard Branson or Paul Allen to top that.

Anyway, it’s been a quiet week for Go Free Range. I’ve been in Scotland (although obviously I’m not there now); Jason’s been in Norfolk; James M has been on the Isle of Wight, and you’ll have to ask Tom and Chris yourself where they hole up for the festive season. Hopefully somewhere warm with access to mulled wine.

I spoke about the coming year in last week’s post, so this week let’s take a look back at 2011.

Who

We started this year as six: myself, James M, Jason, Tom, Kalv and the still-wet-behind-the-ears-but-getting-hairier-by-the-day Chris Roos. In 2010 we’d fluctuated from seven to five to six, but at the start of 2011 we’d hit our stride.

However, in the Autumn, we said goodbye to Kalv, who is now “living the dream” in Vancouver. Presumably the “dream” is riding elk bareback through snowy mountain forests, quaffing maple syrup, which does sound pretty great.

It’s a shame that Kalv didn’t get to work with us on the Single Domain project as he was always very interested in effecting change in government through technology, but we are doing our bit to make him proud from this side of the Atlantic.

It’s never been the plan for GFR to expand, principally because that would force more organisational structure and hierarchy, which is precisely the thing we want to avoid.

That said, we’ve had a few internal conversations about other people we might like to work with. The only concrete conclusion we have at the moment is that there are a bunch of people that we’d very much like to work with this year, and if that leads to anything more significant, well then great.

What

We’ve worked on a range of projects in 2011. The first half of the year was mostly about #blue, integrating more deeply with the SMS infrastructure to give more users access to the service.

We also worked on a few prototype projects for O2, which contained valuable lessons both about how larger companies approach building software, and about how we define our relationship with a client.

We worked with Voicenet to help them start exploring how API might be used to create better, more flexible and more resilient services for their customers.

The year ended with us working with GDS to help with the Single Domain project, and we are very excited to launch the beta early this year, and also to fold development of our project into the full time team.

Its not all been client work though. We built Timmy Printface to demonstrate the liberation of SMSes from phone handsets via the #blue API. We built Linda to explore a simple telephony service that might help when your mobile phone runs out of power.

We prototyped an internal group messaging service – codename PissWhistle – which may or may not resurface in 2012. Tom explored geohashes and spoke about them at geomob. We started building a chaotic administrative exoskeleton - Harmonia - to make running the company smoother.

And, of course, we started writing these week notes.

Where

“To office, or not to office” – this has been an interesting point of internal debate over the past three years. I had originally considered offices an unnecessary overhead which would ultimately push us to do work that we wouldn’t otherwise pursue, just so we could service that overhead.

However, given the, uh, alternative way that we run our company, it’s actually proved incredibly useful to have a shared space that is ours. It provides a “spatio-temporal anchor” that we can use to explore and refine the simple rules that GFR operates with.

We started this year by moving into our first GFR space, nestled in loft space above Protein on Hewett Street.

After around six months, Protein had multiplied so much that they needed their loft back, and so we became temporarily homeless. At that time we were prototyping an API for O2, so we occasionally took advantage of their sponsorship of TechHub to give us a desk to work with our client.

We used a short break in September to find ourselves a new office space. To be honest it took us quite some time to really figure out what we were looking for; our initial net was cast as wide as Edgware Road and Aldgate, and on more than one occasion we took walking tours of London with Mark from Stirling Ackroyd to see what was available in each area.

Eventually we found our new home on Worship Street, just in time to start working on the Single Domain project with GDS in their offices. I really love our office - please do come say hi any time.

How and… Why?

OK, this conceit has started to wear thin, so I’ll say just this: Go Free Range was conceived as a sort-of “field of dreams” idea – if you get a bunch of smart developers working together, there’s nothing that they can’t achieve if they set their minds to it.

I’m looking forward to much more of that in 2012.

Have a great New Year, blog friends.

— James A

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2011-12-23T11:15:00+00:00

Friday 23rd December

by James Adam

Week 153

It’s our last week before the Christmas break, and I think everyone is looking forward to a little time away from the grindstone.

Remote Working

I’m writing these notes from the remote hinterlands of Aberdeen, having been summoned to my place of birth for ~~census~~ festive celebrations. Working remotely has its share of challenges: distractions abound, and it can be hard to feel engaged when your only conduit to the work environment is a Campfire room. Not to mention when you’re waiting 5 minutes for someone to notice that you’ve asked a question.

I’m going to be in Austin for a couple of weeks after New Year, and so these challenges are only going to increase. Some of it comes down to my own discipline, and clarity of the work that needs to be done. But even with that aside, it feels like there’s room for improvement, possibly via some mix of team conventions and a smidge of technology¹.

I’m thinking about some way of poking remotely back into the physical world. Maybe that’s something for 2012, but let’s talk more about that later.

Enough about me.

Rundown!

What have the rest of the Mighty Go Free Range been doing?

Jason has spent the week pulling together all the content and associations in Whitehall, and trying to bring some design sense to bear. He’s also been blazing to yoga every day this week, and begins his personal pilgrimage up to Norfolk today. Oh, this is his jam.

Tom has been working on presenting responses to consultations, and otherwise remains opaque to my remote probes. He’s an enigma, and this is his jam.

James Mead and I have been working on the beginnings of the search implementation for Whitehall, which has brought us into greater contact with the distributed approach that the citizen team is using. I won’t lie: it’s not exactly been easy integration, but it’s often hard to spot assumptions in code until another team tries to use it in anger. And it’s always improving. James has now absconded to his remote lair on the Isle of Wight and, well, you already know where I am. And this is my jam.

Hirsute Chris has been investigating performance improvements to Whitehall, and has also been going to yoga with Jase. There’s a chance when I get back to London that he and Jason will have converted the East Wing of the office into a Bikram studio…

… and this is his jam.

Office Guest!

One of the perks of having our own space is being able to have friends share it with us, and for the past few weeks we’ve had the very pleasant company of Tom Stuart in the office.

I suspect he’s been spending most of his time responding to fan mail and signed headshot requests off the back of his extremely-well-received Programming With Nothing presentation² at Ru3y Manor, but regardless it’s been nice to have a new face around. He even offered to help me with a particularly annoying bug I was seeing one afternoon. What a nice chap.

We’ve also got a couple of weeks in January where we’ll be engaging Tom’s services professionally, which we are all looking forward to. And then, who knows! Grand. OBLIGATORY JAM.

All that and I haven’t even mentioned that he plied us with gifts of yule log and mulled wine, which has become the de facto beverage of choice at GFR HQ; you can still drink mulled wine after Christmas, right? To be frank, I’d like to see you try and stop us.

What’s next?

So now you know all about our week, but as well as continuing our work with GDS, we’ve also been starting to think about what next year might hold for our little band of rebels (presuming we avoid the apocalypse).

In 2011 we’ve have the amazing opportunity to work on some pretty big projects (#blue, gov.uk). One challenge that these big projects present is how consuming they can be; it’s easy to let them soak up all of our attention. While we love working with great clients on interesting projects, we also have other interests and it’s important that we create space to explore and develop them. It’s one of the main reasons our company exists and works the way it does.

So, starting next Spring, we will be spending more time mapping out some potential goals for 2012 and beyond, and then developing projects that will start moving us in the right direction.

Some of those projects may be for clients, while others might be either our own software, or even software that’s never destined to see the light of day. The key is to always be learning.

One possible goal

To start the conversation, I have proposed this:

Try to get better at working together on projects in the absence of a client.

It’s easy to stay focussed when someone has engaged us to build software for them, but in those times between projects when there’s no external motivator it’s very easy to drift into individual projects.

It’s not always a bad thing to spend time idly investigating things in isolation, and we have worked on some internal projects already and learned a great deal. However, I have a hunch that there’s still a lot we could improve on, and I’m looking forward to trying out lots of different approaches to find out what works (and what doesn’t) for us.

Anyway. That’s what I’ve been thinking about. Naturally, everyone else has their own ideas too, and I’m excited to get started on them all.

Perhaps next week we’ll have some GFR New Year resolutions. And more jam.

Until next time, blog friends.

— James A

BERG have already done some poking around this area with availabot, but I think to work well for us, it needs to require almost no effort from the local team. Even changing your IM status might be too much.↩
Here is me on the train up to Scotland trying to work through one of the simpler parts of his presentation. It took me about an hour, but it felt great to be mentally stretching again. So much of our day-to-day work is ultimately just plumbing libraries together, or thinking about how to write a good test; I forgot how much I enjoyed the abstract.↩

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2011-12-19T14:00:00+00:00

Monday 19th December

by Jason Cale

Week 152

Hello there. I’m delivering the notes for last week late, for this I can only apologise, but I think taking some liberties in the name of the festive season is widespread so I’m jumping right onto that bandwagon or sleigh. Urgh.

Anyway, Santa’s bells are ringing in my head and my arms are tired from shovelling the rain off the pavement. So if you are expecting my usual epic ramblings you are probably going to be disappointed .. as this year I’m delivering a little bit of coal for you all. BUT! With a saucy bit of reflection, such coal, if compressed enough, could turn into a beautiful diamond.

However as you can probably tell, even with the intention to write succinctly I can rarely accomplish it .. this introduction clearly manifesting my ineptitude.

The Kinda Juicy Juicy Stuff

To be honest the week was fairly standard.

We continued refining and simmering our development for Gov.uk; blazing some user stories, interrogating user needs and generally delivering bad ass software.

Coffee Dawgs

We popped by our old landlords Protein on Wednesday for the popup lunch spot provided by Big Apple Hotdogs and the grand opening of their coffee shop run by Dunne Frankowski. I don’t chow down on animals anymore, so I just filled my mind with espresso and watched as Tom, James A and Chris devoured what smelt like a blooming nice dog.

The main take away from this is we have a sweet place to hit up for some good coffee that is really close by, and the fact that we know the folks who run and inhabit the joint makes it extra cushty. Yeahhh.

InterConnected Planetary Planetary InterConnected

We finally got our broadband connection in the office, so we can jump off the blooming expensive leased line we have been using in the short term (provided by our landlord). We celebrated by watching youtube clips of cats doing HILARIOUS things* and ordering life size cardboard cut outs of Alexander O’Neil*.

Leads leads leads are looking for a good time

Our continuing swell of work interest from various people looking for development partnerships carried on, with Chris and Myself meeting a potential suitor on Thursday, which was an interesting little chat — it culminated in us discussing the possibility of incubating some projects in house, ourselves perhaps providing some funding to worthy project causes in the form of development or even capital. Very much ‘Pie in the sky’ at the moment, but it is always an interesting topic to throw around the office.

Festive Lunch, Beer, Etc

Friday we downed tools, or at least put our macs to sleep and headed to Byron on Hoxton Square for some burgers and reflective chat. We then decamped to Mason & Taylor via the Reliance for beers and deterioration of conversation into the cold friday night.

That’s all folks

I’ve probably forgotten lots of things, rest assumed all the stuff I forgot was well killer and I was so in the moment I didn’t have a single neuron left for reflective consciousness.

But maybe I’ve dropped the bar sufficiently low enough with this update in order to allow James A to completely blow you all away with his coverage of the week we are riding right now, the week that will go down in history, number 153.

Have a great festive period, love all the people, give generously, receive graciously, and don’t get so pissed that you set your house on fire again this year eh?

PEACE.

* I LIED, sorry baby saints.

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2011-12-09T10:00:00+00:00

Friday 09th December

by Jason Cale

Week 151

Afternoon sports fans.

I’m sure you are all hoping I’m going to discuss the wind and the cold weather we are having here in sunny London. I’ve pretty much had my fill IRL, so I’m going to share the playbook for the week known as #151.

How it will pan out in terms of the whole season remains to be seen, the sceptics have been unusually quiet as the play has been unfolding; it seems everyone is holding their breath (even though it makes pretty steam in the moonlight).

Monday

We kicked off this week with an away game at the GovUK ground Aviation House. Spirits were high but as everyone can sympathise, at this time in the season, tiredness remains in everyones limbs. We dug deep with early pep talk from our coffee supplier and rushed on to get this weeks game underway. The stories were stacked in Pivotal Tracker and we were ready to hit it hard.

As half time approached, we broke play to huddle in the dugout at Aviation House under the watchful gaze of Martha Lane Fox’s giant visage that adorns the wall, the crowd wore their ceremonial golden hotdogs.

Discussion turned to giving further transparency of how we are doing as a business, especially in the order of our financials. We discussed the possibility of opening up our books, perhaps making FreeAgent account open for public consumption.

This would allow people to see exactly how we are making money, what we are charging, what our outgoings are, and the personal remuneration for our time on the roster at GFR.

We have concerns that whilst we are very comfortable with opening up our guts to the world, our consideration for the welfare of our clients is a factor in how we go about exposing the rates we set for certain projects; specifically any differences that there may have been on a financial level.

This is partly because we often derive value from something other than just the monetary exchange between agency and client. When we agree to engage in some work we evaluate other things such as interestingness, challenges presented and how worthwhile we feel the project is on human terms (etc) and this will affect how we price our iterations.

We reflected that perhaps this is hard to communicate succinctly, or more importantly it is missing if we just happen to expose the financials.

Play resumed after we turned the conversation towards what we are planning to do for a seasonal-festive-themed lunch followed by beers and pineapple juice. A topic which is still unresolved as yet.

A theme which was brought into play by the Ven. Dokktor Adam was to take some time to think and discuss a bit more about what we are planning for 2012.

Quite simply, we are revisiting the recurring question of what do we really want to be doing in this game? What do we want to try next? Do we want to build something of our own, do we want to take some time out to experiment and blow things up?

We know that it is really easy to carry on delivering client work, hitting sixes and getting paid to realise other people’s visions. One of core the ideas GFR was founded from is the wish to explore what could happen if you bring together a bunch of smart people — who are each very capable of creating something good — and actually trying to do that together as a business.

Doing this is hard, and therefore requires some momentum to make it happen, and of course some idea or direction in which to take that momentum.

Cosmic Spiral had a fortunate incident (which may ripple out benefits to the wider league) on this day. For a while he has been wanting to go on a longer (insight) meditation retreat and has been graciously allowed to take a month out during March 2012 to deepen his meditation practice and hang out at his spiritual home Gaia House in near Newton Abbot, so he booked it up toot-sweeeet and laughed into the abyss.

The day closed out even score, with Wandering T.A. Ward hitting a smooth saddle blast out to the offside field to tie the score at 17-17.

Tuesday

Play was held on home turf in Shoreditch, Cosmic Spiral was playing hard on delivering some FRESH design work for the Whitehall GovUK app, the bookies placing considerable value on the league cup match on Thursday which would see all divisions come together for the launch of the Government Digital Service at Aviation House. This design component was deemed pivotal in the pitching ability of our frontline attack, with Neil “Double Hitter” Williams on the mound for most of the days play.

However team interest was diverted by the surprise appearance of CAKE delivered to the team bench by Wandering Ward. It was eaten with gusto to the applause of the spectators who turned out in numbers despite the cold front which had been threatening play for much of the week.

Wednesday

Cosmic Spiral and Bear Catcher Roos remained fixed in outfield positions at Shoreditch, with Blazing Sails Mead delivering game from his Oxford outpost, Wandering Ward and the Ven. Dokktor took flight to Aviation House to ensure the front line was flanked sufficiently.

Our team has seen an increased inpouring of lucrative sponsorship and league transfer deals this week, more so than usual, the first of which was caught by Bear Catcher staying true to his moniker with a Skype call with a potential playmaker.

Scores and spirits were dramatically raised when we finished the days play with a winning score of 34-7. The crowd’s voluminous response was only dampened by an unfortunate incident with a screwdriver and a barrel chested construction worker trapped in the ceremonial field of oxen.

Thursday

League Cup match at Aviation House.

Chaos reigned high as the crowds piled into to a packed out arena, the celebrity judges and journalists were on show to mark this prestigious occasion.

Taking centre stage was Double Hitter Williams with his presentation to the board of trustees. Tensions ran high as he delivered a masterful stroke, sending the ball deep into the outfield; a range of 457 feet was recorded and the crowd erupted with silence.

Goodfellow P. Herlihy was on hand fresh from his suspension for suspected foul play at Death At The Well earlier in the season to deliver his rhetoric on the e-petitions website which he was part of before his transfer to the GovUK league early this season.

Whilst such extrovert play was unfolding in the centre field, the intrepid players of Go Free Range remained in tight formation, attacking the current backlog with jaw-breaking blows and god like athletic ability.

Although Cosmic Spiral did suffer some hair related disasters, and the usual cheering from the female contingent of the crowd had abated somewhat, spectators did comment that whilst his outward composure was maintained, the usual trademark flow of his game suffered visibly.

Violent wind stopped play at 234-45, and the team retired to a mountain of mince pies and mohair dressing gowns.

Friday

The tournament resumed after the halt in play, with only a few serious flesh wounds submitted onto the official game card.

Spiral and Catcher started out the day at Shoreditch, with Ven. Dokktor Adam claiming a double-point play beginning at Aviation House and ending up in the Shoreditch to collect two gold star meeting certificates with potential playmakers.

One of the discussions is said to be with O2, rumour has it that it was concerning GFR’s re-entry into the fabled O2 HashBlue league in which GFR exited as reining champions only the season before.

Pundits are excited to understand how this could affect this most important league, which is ripe for expansion into the super leagues. Critics have long commented that they should look into increasing the numbers of players and spectators.

Meanwhile Wandering T.A. Ward and Blazing Sails fought a late game battle alongside Double Hitter and Goodfellow in arranging the coming attractions and story cards for next-weeks tournament.

This often tricky component of play is difficult to manage, and we are continuing to strive to understand how we can effectively frame what really needs to be worked on. The aim being to pin down what is truly important without blindly falling into to trap of resigning ourselves to fitting our user stories against the shadow of how we may have imagined thing should work.

The true art of this game emerges when we react with agility to the unfolding demands of play, and not resting on yesterdays game plan.

End of play saw the scores tie at 34-45 with the possibility of disciplinary action for a offside foul by Goodfellow earlier in the week.

Final scores

Bear Catcher (78) …. Cosmic Spiral (88) …. Ven. Dokktor Adam (109) …. Goodfellow (56) …. Wandering T.A. Ward (778) …. Double Hitter (101) …. Blazing Sails (107) ….

BYE

I’m sorry? Big love, Cosmic Spiral.

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2011-12-05T10:00:00+00:00

Monday 05th December

by Chris Roos

Week 150

What’s this? Week notes at the end of the week. Like, on a Friday an’ stuff. Mental. And what’s this, someone other than Chris writing them!? Well, kinda, it’s actually me and it’s Monday. Zero out of two’s not bad though eh.

We were a man down at the beginning of last week: our very own Mr Ward was ill and, in his words, “did a Chris” (got up, laid down on the bed and then woke up much, much later). This has obviously never happened to me so I take great offence.

Jaaaase took care of dealing with BT on Tuesday. We’re in the process of trying to get a broadband connection installed but we must’ve upset the Gods because we’ve already been waiting for about a year (or six weeks, whatever). We do have an install date now though, albeit one that’s another two weeks away.

James A and Tom made some good headway toward getting our Whitehall app integrated with the GovUK router. The router’s going to sit toward the top of the stack and pass requests off to the relevant app behind the scenes so this is critical work for the single-domainedness. We also had fun with some subtle bugs throughout the week, including a libxml2/nokogiri oddity and a Rails Engine oddity.

James A also managed to find time to resurrect Timmy Printface (Timmy was jealous of this Little Printer fella) and to work through more of the videos from Ru3y Manor.

Jase did a great job of adding some flair to our office with the painting of our logo on the wall. Look, there’s even a picture for your delectation.

This was just in time for our very splendid Office warming last Thursday. There was mulled wine, beer, mince pies and crisps. More importantly though, there were people! Although it would appear that we don’t have any photographic evidence so you’ll just have to take our word for it, mmmkay. Seriously, thanks to everyone that turned up, we had a great evening.

All that’s left is for me to wish you all a good week and enjoy the hour remaining before I get “randomly” selected to write the weeknotes for week 151.

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2011-11-27T17:30:00+00:00

Sunday 27th November

by Chris Roos

Week 149

Well hello there everybody peeps. It’s me. Again. And these are late. Again. Whatever.

I’m sure you all enjoyed following along with ticketgate in which we learnt that James doesn’t like cheap conference tickets. I am jesting, obviously. To me, the whole affair shows just how committed James is to challenging the status quo. And not challenging, as was suggested at one point, by saying, “You’re doing it wrong. Do it like this.”, but challenging by really questioning the motivation behind certain decisions. Although not a fight I would pick myself I applaud James’s determination in his battle against ~~cheap conference tickets~~ the status quo.

We made some good progress toward the single domainedness (consistent interface across all the apps) of the GovUK project this week, specifically with the introduction of slimmer into the Whitehall codebase. Although that took quite a while, we also managed to do some work around storing files on S3, refining the concept of Publications in the system, popping on a lick of paint and we even spent a short while writing a little bit of unobtrusive javascript google maps magic. Plus, cough plummy cough.

Oh, and the other big GovUK news is that we’ve been paid - woohoo.

James A and I spent a couple of hours working on Harmonia on Wednesday. The aim was to fix a little bug that had reared its head on a couple of occassions. We took the opportunity to practise some more-extreme-than-normal paired test driven development: one person would write a test and the other would make it pass in the simplest way possible. It was definitely an interesting experiment and it felt good to go back to basics and question some of the fundamental blocks that our practice sits upon.

On Wednesday James A, James M and I met with some people that are possibly after some development goodness in the New Year. We’ll have to wait to see how that goes.

Thursday evening saw our very own Mr Tom Ward presenting at the Geomob November 2011 meet-up. I wasn’t able to make it (mainly because I forgot it was on and had made other plans) but I’m sure Tom did a great job, even if he did feel like a bit of a fraud presenting in front of all the hardcore map aficiandos.

Jase and I learnt what it means to be a fire warden at a little training session on Friday. I must admit to wondering what we were going to get out of it (there are only 5 of us and we’re not always in the office) but I can definitely see the benefit now.

We finished off the week with a GovUK show and tell and then a lovely team trip to the pub: Neil had an evening pass so we celebrated with lots of beer. It was good.

I’m going to end with another plug for our office warming this Thursday (1st December). Come along: You never know, it might be alright.

Have good weeks everybody peeps. Over and out.

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2011-11-18T17:30:00+00:00

Friday 18th November

by Jason Cale

Week 148

Hello lovelies.

Friendly Introduction

The chaos goddess has shined her luminous bosom in my direction this week. Thanks are partly due to the beautiful unfolding of the cosmos and partly due to this commit in which James A managed to locate and unravel a kinky-kink in the space time continuum. Imagine a giant pearl necklace, no, even bigger than that, massive, each pearl the size of a million enchanted forests, but this is just a scale, it is much bigger, more real AND this is the tip of the iceberg of beauty in which we are swimming, imagine it.

Now come back.

So with our friendly introductory discourse dealt with, lets get straight to the hard facts.

Hard facts

We’ve been continuing with our work on Gov.uk, rolling out some bad ass features as standard. We switched to one week iterations from two week ones we started out with (this was initially to line up team working on the Citizen focused offering). I much prefer this as it feels like you can bury your nose in and focus, for a nice maintainable pace over the week, with a planning game before the weekend break, and we can come back fresh to it.

I guess tighter feedback loops with our users is also argument for doing it, but as we were deploying in shorter intervals than once per sprint anyway, we’ve been pretty tight with our users from the start.

Drawing perfect circles for infinity

When we were working on #blue I was bothering Tom about some link-to-and-back-from pages in the app dependent on the context of where the user has come from or was intending to do.

As usual Tom had “some code to do that” which we popped right in (after writing some tests for it, natch).

It turned out that we’d like something similar for Gov.uk, so we have made a Gem aptly called Boomerang to wrap up the functionality. Our limbs cleansed and free, we can use it wherever we please — and because it’s on github you can too!

Talkin’ ‘bout The Smiling Geohash Blues

Longtime readers (for at least a couple of weeks) may know about Tom’s Geohash Toy Thing with which you can get all crazy with the Geohashes. If you don’t know why you would want to go all crazy with the Geohashes, then you need to go listen to Tom talk about why you want to go all crazy with the Geohashes at the GeoMob November Shindig happening next week.

Chris Wants To Bag It Up

On tuesday our friends at Hackney Council came round and sorted out our recycling for us; for a little fee (bout a-quid-fiddy per bag) they will take away our paper mache monsters and turn them into fancy loo roll and organic hamster cardigans.

We are very happy about this because we like to keep our relationship with Mother Nature the same colour as our test suite.

Party, Karamu, Fiesta, Forever!

Yesterday the INTERNET was ah-blaze with the news of our “totally rad” Office Warmpocalypse. It was well Bieber.

Yes! Our massive space needs to be filled with toxic substances and human bodies in order to test the parameters of our fire code.

You, Dear Reader are forever invited to come and make history at the biennial Go Free Range office ceremony where we will all join hands and witness the consummation.

All the details are laid out for your eyes and it would be royally splendid if you would grace our humble abode with your beautiful instance of human.

Roos is a lightweight

Not sure what happened but our intrepid hairy-code deleting-surf hippy-stalwart of good times-Chris-MotherFlippin-Roos came in at like 2pm today. Rumour is going round that now that Chris has entered deep into Old Age (30) that he can no longer handle his drinks.

Better make it a shandy tonight then, Chris.

Dramatic Farewell

I hope your mind is free and your hearts pumping fast for the weekend ahead.

May all your Oscar Wildest dreams come true.

JASE.

Recent

week-147

2011-11-14T13:27:00+00:00

Monday 14th November

by Chris Roos

Week 147

Good afternoon on this very fine late Summer day. The notes are a little late coming (again) so apologies for that (again).

We kicked off last week in our own office, in order to give time for the dust to settle in Aviation House (the new home of GDS). It sounded like the dust had settled by around Wednesday and so we started sharing our time between Worship Street and Aviation House. The new building’s pretty good; a little bouncy due to the suspended floors and occasionally a little noisy, but generally a big, light, open area of hotdesking goodness (you can find us on the first desks as you walk in).

When we took on the Worship Street property we agreed to take on everything that was left within it, which amounted to a few desks, chairs and other officey things you might expect. James A had already spent quite some time removing the drawers from underneath the good desks and had moved everything that we weren’t going to use into one corner of the office. Although it was tucked out the way (at just under 1000 square feet, the office is plenty big enough for five of us) it was great to have it picked up by Hackney Council on Wednesday. It’s doubly great because they take it away for recycling rather than it just going in a landfill. As always Jase was willing to get stuck right in with the furniture dismantling.

James A spent Wednesday morning at the Ruby Business meetup where he chatted about company insurance and cucumber (it sounds as though we’ve independently come to some similar conclusions as Chris Parsons), met a fan of #blue and was surprised to discover that people still don’t 100% get that we’re all GFR co-owners and all share the business stuff as well as development.

The end of GFR week 147 brought with it the end of sprint 4 of our Govuk (I like to think this is pronounced like Southwark) work. The end of the week also saw our free Pivotal Tracker plan come to an end. In the spirit of openness, rather than pay to keep it closed, it’s now been converted to a public project. I think this is a great thing to do and applaud Pete for making it happen.

That’ll have to do for now. Have a good week and hopefully someone other than Tom or I will be covering week 148.

Recent

week-146

2011-11-07T09:00:00+00:00

Monday 07th November

by Tom Ward

Week 146

What do 1 x “Creatable 80-Piece Dinner Set”, 1 x “3M Command Hooks Value Pack - Medium”, 1 x “Bodum 1801 Assam Tea Press with Glass Handle and Stainless Steel Filter”, 1 x “Sanyo EM-G255AW 17 litre 700 watt Touch Control Microwave Oven with Grill” and 1 x “Premier Housewares Athana Stainless Steel 24-Piece Cutlery Set” have in common?

They are all things we’ve ordered from Amazon this week, to try and make our office a little more comfortable to work in. We now have enough cheap white plates and cutlery to open a small café. Not to mention pots and machines to make every caffeinated drink you can imagine (if you have a limited imagination). Personally I most looking forward to seeing what the “Fruit Bowl and Banana Hanger” looks like. Are the two combined in some weird and wonderful way?

When it comes to actual work, it’s been another big week working on gov.uk. We always try and get as much feedback from real users as early as we possibly can, so it was great on Monday to meet editors from several government departments for a show and tell. It was a valuable meeting. While they seemed impressed with what we’ve built to date, they didn’t hold back with their comments. We came away with a long list of suggested improvement, things we’ve overlooked and new problems to solve.

We’ve already added features based on their feedback, such as the ability to quickly publish content without having it reviewed. We’d assumed that most content would be written over a number of days or weeks, which will be true for the vast majority of thing. However, departments like the Foreign and Commonwealth Office often have to react to world events that change minute by minute. In these cases, they need to get news out fast.

Other things we’ve worked on include new filters for admins, being able to delete items (revolutionary!), and general admin functions. It’s all coming together quite nicely.

Finally, Friday was the last day for gov.uk in the ‘non-descript office building’ Hercules House. The team will be moving to Aviation House (opposite Holborn tube station), and we’ll be joining them (when we’re not in our own office). As usual, if you’re nearby, give us a shout.

All the best for the coming week,

Tom

P.S. Assignment of the weeknotes is supposed to be random. Our Harmonia tool chooses one of us each week to write a few words about what we’ve been up to. Yet of the 9 times we’ve written notes, I’ve been chosen 4 times. I’m starting to get suspicious. If I get chosen next week, I’ll be calling D.I. Ben Griffiths in.

Recent

week-145

2011-10-31T13:00:00+00:00

Monday 31st October

by Chris Roos

Week 145

Harmonia and Chris, sitting in a tree, W.R.I.T.I.N.G. AGAIN. Truth be told, I’m going off her a bit. Maybe I should complain to HR about bullying or something. Oh, and apologies for the lateness of these notes (we’re into week 146 already). My bad.

Last week was the first time that all five of us had been around for a while. Which was nice. We even got to spend a few days in our shiny new office. Which was also nice. Well, apart from Tuesday, when a couple of us were struggling with a three mifi device to provide our Internet connectivity. These troubles were all solved on Wednesday with the installation of a 2Mb leased line (we’re trialling it for a month to see how it might compare to a standard broadband offering).

We took advantage of us all being together to spend a little time discussing the future of the GFR family. Should we bring more people in? Should we restrict these additional peeps to the set of people we already know? How long would any kind of probation period be before they would be set free to do everything in the business? Would we ever consider taking people on who wouldn’t join in with all company responsibilities? We certainly don’t have any clear answers to these questions yet but they’re good things to be discussing.

The end of GFR week 145 signalled the end of sprint 3 of our work at GDS. We’re still making good progress with the app and something akin to progress with the Capita procurement process we have to go through before we can our hands on the monies.

Saturday saw our very own James, along with Murray and Tom, host Ru3y Manor. I wasn’t able to make it unfortunately but I understand it to have been a great success and look forward to seeing the videos.

Recent

week-144

2011-10-22T17:00:00+01:00

Saturday 22nd October

by Tom Ward

Week 144

Before I get started, I want to congratulate Pete on his new baby who was born last Sunday. The news came as a happy surprise to us all, mainly because none of us had any idea that he had a wife, let alone that she was pregnant. Nonetheless, all the best to baby Olivia and the whole family.

For the rest of us it’s been a busy week yet again for us all. Well, all of us except Chris, who’s been sunning himself in Fuerteventura. It’s the one week in the year where his standard uniform of t-shirt, beach shorts and flip-flops will fit right in. No doubt he’ll be wearing a suit instead.

On Tuesday we were interviewed by Ana from the Brazilian Globo TV about our work on Chromaroma. Jase, James Adam and I went down to our new office, both to work and be filmed. We got James to answer all the questions, while Jase and I pretended to look busy in the background. After my last experience of being videoed, I wanted to stay as far from the camera as I could manage.

Thursday saw Jason give a talk at the UKUPA, about how we run a team without leadership. It was very well received, and I’d like to think he’s inspired a few more people to run their companies like ours.

In between these talks and interviews, we’ve been making a lot of progress on our whitehall app. We’ve been wrestling with and solving a number of questions, such as who actually gives speeches (the minister or the person?), is a consultation deadline a time or date, and what’s the difference between the Permanent Secretary of each department and this list of Permanent Secretaries? All more subtle problems than you’d first think.

Next week will be the first time for a while that all five of us have been around. We’ll be working out of both Lambeth (with the gov.uk team) and our new office in Shoreditch, so if you’re near either of them come and say hi.

All the best until then,

Tom

Recent

week-143

2011-10-15T09:42:00+01:00

Saturday 15th October

by Chris Roos

Week 143

Aloha, it’s me again, Chris (that’s my picture over in the corner, although I’ve got better hair than that now). The Goddess of Harmony has once again chosen me to write of our exploits on this, the 143rd week of Go Free Range. I’ve got a strict time limit to get this done as I’m off to get a bit of sun in Fuerteventura later today. I’m also hoping that it’s not the most boring post that’s ever been written which, according to my “friend” Eliot, I managed to achieve with last weeks effort.

Anyways, on with the good stuff.

Jase has been away all week on a throwing course in St Ives. I can’t even being to imagine how far he’s going to be able to throw stuff now - he was pretty good before he went.

Last weeks decision to buy computers and telephones through the company came in handy after I dropped, and destroyed, my old HTC on the way to work. Needless to say I was pretty excited to take delivery of my shiny new iPhone+ toward the end of the week.

The four of us left at GDS got a little workout on Monday when we moved to a different office and had to dismantle the little cubicle farm so that we could all sit together (awwh, isn’t that sweet).

James and Tom headed over to LRUG’s Battleship: Ruby Fight Club event after work on Monday. I think Tom’s pretty convinced he would’ve won had he not been delayed talking to the ISP in our new office (a somewhat lame excuse if you ask me).

Thursday saw us on a team building afternoon with Pete and Neil. We chose a lovely little pub as the location to eat, drink and talk about Neil’s desire to vejazzle the site (I’m not sure what the site’s got to do with Vespas but I can’t wait to find out.) Silliness aside for a second, we do want to make the publishing aspect of the site as simple and intuitive as possible: it’s going to be used by people familiar with a variety of existing systems and we need to ensure the transition is as smooth as possible. With silliness firmly switched back on we also discussed the David Icke flag that would allow you to see the government in all their reptilian glory. We almost certainly won’t do this :-).

Tom was away at Magrails in Manchester on Friday. He normally writes copious amounts of notes at the conferences he attends so I’m sure we’ll all be able to read a full report next week, eh Tom?

Friday also saw the end of sprint two of our work on GDS. We ended with Neil demoing the product to a pretty big audience of other developers, editors and some other government folks that I’m not familiar with. It’s great having Neil run these end of sprint demos as it allows us to see how he thinks about and uses the product.

Aside from all that we have had at least a couple of interesting conversations about our testing approach and specifically our use of Cucumber. It’s fair to say that these conversations can be quite hard but I definitely think they’re useful in helping us find a consistent approach. We’ve probably got the beginnings of something that we can start writing about, but that’ll definitely have to wait for another day.

And I reckon that’ll just about do for this week. I’m off to get some last minute practice of saying “dos cervezas por favor” before jetting off. Have good weekends and weeks everybody peeps.

Recent

week-142

2011-10-09T15:00:00+01:00

Sunday 09th October

by Chris Roos

Week 142

We’re now three weeks into the Gov UK project, although I think our deep immersion makes it feel somewhat longer. Longer in a good way, that is.

We’re currently working on the Corporate government website but there’s plenty more going on in the wider GDS development team. As the team grows so it becomes more important to have some consistency in approach. To that end the whole team spent some time chatting about a range of topics including coding styles, testing approaches and branching strategies. While we’re completely behind the idea of consistency across projects we couldn’t help but take a little dig at the decision to use ERB over HAML :-).

Having the discussion reminded me how lucky GFR are to have all worked with each other for a number of years: I think we have a pretty good shared understanding of how to work together.

I spent most of Tuesday working with Pete to question some of the assumptions set out in the wireframes we’re using. We feel pretty lucky to be working with both Neil and Pete: they’re very knowledgable about the product and completely open to our questioning.

This week has also seen a couple of departmental editors starting to play with the initial version of the app and provide feedback, which is incredibly valuable.

GFR

Tom’s been banging on about buying computer equipment through the company for ages. Jase’s laptop dying was the perfect opportunity for him to raise the issue again and we now have two fancy new MacBook Airs in the GFR family.

Working full time on Gov UK has lead us to neglect some of the GFR projects we (well, James) started. We’re still using them but they’re not getting any active development love at the moment.

The Office

We spent a few hours on Saturday moving all our office furniture from my flat into our new office. The next step is to find some time when we’re all available to tidy, organise, decorate and generally make it somewhere that we want to be.

Other

I was intrigued to know what this was the 142nd week of. I had assumed, correctly as it turns out, that it was of the life of the company but wanted to double check.

$ ruby -rdate -e"\
days_since_incorporation = Date.parse('2011-10-07') - Date.parse('2009-01-13'); \
puts 'Week: ' + (days_since_incorporation / 7.0).to_i.to_s"
Week: 142

Recent

week-141

2011-10-03T18:30:00+01:00

Monday 03rd October

by Tom Ward

Week 141

Big news this week: we now have an office. It’s been a (very) long process, but on Thursday we finally signed a lease on some space in Worship Street. It’s great to have a new home. We’ll be sure to invite you all around when we move in.

I say when, because at the moment we’re all working with the Gov UK team in Lambeth. Our new office may lie empty for a while.

It was my first week working with the team, and I’m really impressed with how much has been achieved. We’ve built a small platform to publish various bits of government information, with a simple workflow and fact-checking facilities baked right in. In the next sprint we’ll build on this, adding more knowledge about the structure of government. That’s when things become really interesting. Remember, you can follow along at home.

One advantage of being based in Lambeth is that we get to watch the other Gov UK team members at work. The whole office has a real buzz; a feeling that everyone’s contributing to something significant.

Jase in Sofia

While most of us have been toiling in Lambeth, Jason took his trip to Sofia to speak at DesignDay 2011. His talk went well, but his attempts to follow a vegan diet faltered.

Miscellany

Other bits and pieces include the fact that James Adam is making one of his regular visits to Austin, Texas. He’ll be working whilst away; our challenge is to keep working as a team despite the time-zone mismatch. We’re not great at it yet, but we’re determined to get better.

Finally, I and other members of the team are busy working on our LRUG Battleship programs. If you want to challenge us, there’s about a week left to write yourself a player. You’d better hope that Paul has implemented some strict security counter measures, because like all good Generals, I intend to cheat. Remember, all’s fair in love and war.

Recent

harmonia

2011-09-25T13:55:00+01:00

Sunday 25th September

by James Adam

Harmonia (a.k.a. Chaos Administration)

At Free Range everyone is responsible for everything, but who is responsible for delegating work so everything gets done? Harmonia, the Chaos Administrator.

Background¹

One of the things that separates us from typical companies is that we don’t operate within a hierarchy, or with a fixed set of roles.

We don’t divide the business responsibilities in arbitrary ways; none of us want to be an accountant or an office manager. We’re not a big enough company to require any dedicated staff to grease the wheels of our organisation. That’s by design.

But shit still needs to get done, so rather than waste energy discussing or rota planning each chore, we use this software to automatically delegate those chores within the team.

Can’t people just remember, or decide between themselves on an ad-hoc basis?

Not really, no. We’ve learned that by sacrificing a bit of individual freedom, you actually liberate much more of your energy and focus for the important (and more enjoyable) aspects of your business.

Instead of wasting any time trying to remember who did what last week and then assign duties for this week, we don’t even think about it until Harmonia sends us our assignments.

This is really the key insight: when dealing with the boring responsibilities or chores in life, automate as much as possible, then work hard to eliminate thought and decision making surrounding the rest.

Why not a rota?

A rota may be functionally equivalent, but rotas need to be maintained and updated. Chaos is an eternal fountain. More seriously, we value the ability to run without maintenance over absolute fairness.

There’s also something to be said for more aggressive repetition than a rota would provide; if I end up having to run the invoices three times in a row, I’m going to be in a better position to spot further automation opportunities than if it was a task I only did every other month. And then everyone wins.

What kind of tasks are suitable?

Anything that can be reduced to a clear set of instructions with minimal amount of decision making. Importing bank transactions, sending invoices, and assigning temporary responsibilities (like weeknotes) are ideal, but more will certainly follow².

Under the hood

Harmonia’s implementation is almost trivially simple. It uses cron and emails, via the whenever and mail gems respectively. Mail templates are stored as ERb files.

Currently assignments are made at noon on Monday each week, as dictated by the schedule.rb file.

‘YMMV³’

At the moment this is clearly tailored towards our company, and this may always be the case. It’s also a bit of an experiment: in the future we might discover a problem working this way. However, for the moment it’s freed up a good chunk of organisational energy that we can now pour back into our creative work.

One of the great things about being in a business where you build stuff is that you can produce bespoke tools that fit perfectly to your flow, but more importantly can be adapted as the organisation, and as your understanding of how things work, changes. I don’t think there are many industries where the overlap between the tools we produce and the tools we use to operate are so similar. It would seem a shame not to take advantage of that, don’t you think?

If you have any thoughts about this, we’d love to hear from you, either via email, twitter, your own blog or even a pull request ;)

We mentioned Harmonia in week-138, but since the README was sparse those few weeks ago, I thought it was worth expanding and explaining in more detail. I’ve expanded on the new README here.↩
Who’s going to keep our new office stocked with fruit and milk? :)↩
“Your mileage may vary” - in other words, please take these ideas and test them, adapt them, reformulate them to suit your own circumstances.↩

Recent

week-140

2011-09-23T18:30:00+01:00

Friday 23rd September

by Jason Cale

Week 140

So here I am, at the helm of this weeks notes. We’re all jumping up at the gates of the weekend, so I’ll try and give you the good stuff before you head off into the wilderness, or at least the local pub.

Diving into gov.uk

Our intrepid voyage into the heart of our fair nation’s government began this week. Myself, James A, and Chris converged upon Lambeth to setup alongside the totally badass Government Digital Service (GDS) team.

With lots of familiar faces to greet our arrival on the 6th floor, and many more revered hands to shake, we were itching to get started.

What we are building

Our task is to build the ‘corporate’ publishing platform, which will replace the menagerie of existing solutions and hopefully enrich the working experience of those fine folks who will use it to put all that glorious information out onto the web.

We have decided to work in 2-week sprints/iterations (instead of our usual single week) to co-inside with the main team’s momentum, and have generated enough user stories to have a decent first offering for real users to play with after the first sprint.

Working with us to deliver the publishing platform is Peter Herlihy — our agile loving project manager — and Neil Williams on loan from the Department for Business, who is leading our team.

Neil is our man inside, with the brains and experience to ensure we deliver the all-killer-no-filler product that the publishing team deserve.

Slicing up the work

We began with the concept of creating and publishing policy documents, and have taken a thin end-to-end slice through the grand design in order to realise something of real value as quickly as possible.

You can see exactly what we have done so far as all the code is on github and freakin’ open source — just like it should be!

The only #dark period this week was when we had to figure out if our publishing platform was going to be a duplicate of effort when evaluated against some of the tools the main team have built so far.

However after a little bit of poking and beard scratching (which Chris’ beard provides ample utility for those of us who prefer to brave the world bare faced) we decided that we can safely forge ahead with our own solution for now at least.

We’ll revisit it later on to extract any common good and reuse useful components between the two projects.

Surnames of the apocalypse

Pete (our PM) discovered that all of our surnames at GFR are four letters long. Chris is now adamant that there is some divine message encased within this discovery, and has entered into a personal dark night of the soul in which he will uncover the true meaning of our union.

Alongside certain smaller discoveries reported this week, I’m sure you will agree it is indeed a baffling time for human understanding.

Getting closer to Clojure.

James Mead spent Monday and Tuesday kicking the tires of Clojure and attending Top Down TDD in Clojure with Brian Marick.

Maybe James might be up for writing about his experiences in the future, but in the meantime he has sent me a link to Robert Chatley’s thoughts for your digestion. If you look closely you can see our main man down on the bottom of the page, with his trademark grin — Hi James!

Frozen Rails

Tom shuffled off to Helsinki to attend Frozen Rails, and his top line editorial today was “Pretty cool. And wet”.

Seems like most of the ingredients for what the conference name suggests, but other than that I’m not had chance to delve into his experience more. So perhaps I’ll persuade Tom to write his thoughts somewhere for us to share.

Office nonsense

Our impending office move madness is still under way, to be honest it is a deluge of lawyers, estate agents and too many emails for me to really comprehend what is going on. But I’m told by my ever patient colleagues that we should be completing on Thursday next week, so that will be nice, and I can fulfil my job as “the designer” to buy flock wallpaper and look for suitably weathered chesterfields on Ebay.

Speaking in Bulgaria

Finally the time has come for me to fly over to Bulgaria next week to give my talk Emergent design: Practical approaches for agile web design to the attendees of DesignDay 2011.

Having spent so much time preparing and drawing silly illustrations for my slides, I’m itching to give it, but also to getting some of my life back (read: yoga and sleeping). Every time I agree to give a talk I seem to forget how much work goes into doing the blooming things. Most regrettably perhaps this forgetfulness also appears when I attend conferences as a punter, where I perhaps do not give enough due respect to those speaking as I ought…

Wrapping up

It’s been a full on week, writing this has taken me way longer than it should have, so I hope your pints slipped down well and you enjoy reading this whilst waiting for your curry to be delivered, whatever your weekend holds for you I hope it is a good one.

Stay tuned for more of our adventures in our helping to revolutionise the government, and unravelling the mysteries of the universe.

Until next time,

Jase!

Recent

week-139

2011-09-16T17:30:00+01:00

Friday 16th September

by Tom Ward

Week 139

It's natural that some weeks will be quiet, and others be busy. Occasionally though, you have a week that seems both.

On the surface, we haven't had much to do. With no client work and very little admin (our office move is proceeding smoothly), it's been a nice break from the usual stresses and strains. On the other hand, there are always hundreds of things you want to complete "when I've got the time". When you do have the time, it can be a struggle to fit them all in.

Making things

Last week James mentioned spiking some scripts to build a new email tool. This week it has a name, Sauron. It's been harder than expected to collate all our emails (mine in particular seem to break things), but it's now ready for us to try out. We don't yet know how useful it will prove, but the only way to really find out is to use it.

Meanwhile Chris has been moving a bunch of old code into github. As a Google fanboy, it must have been painful for him saying goodbye to Google Code. He's sorted through his old projects, discarding some and keeping others, taking the opportunity to clean up those that remain. One of those is Active Places, a project from the first Rewired State National Hack The Government day. He's tidied it up so it's usable, using bundler to lock the dependencies as if it was still 2009. Hopefully this isn't the end of the story - it's a lot better than the official government site.

Jase has been working hard writing his talk for a conference in Bulgaria, and I've been doing more work on my experimental Capistrano deployment recipes. They're not there quite yet, but I think they show promise. I also finally published a post on the geohash toy I wrote. 6 weeks as a draft is 5.9 weeks too long.

Meeting people

On Monday, James and I popped down to LRUG to hear Chris Parsons and other members of the Agile Delivery Network talk about their experiences building the new Government e-petitions site. They demonstrated clearly what can be achieved by an agile team in a very short timescale, but better than that, were candid about what things went wrong.

We also dropped in at the Ruby Business Meetup, chatting about all things ruby and business.

The future

Next week we're starting work with gov.uk (the project formerly known as alphagov). They've assembled a formidable team, whom we're really looking forward to working with. We've had to drop our rates a little and turn down other work, but it will be worth it if we realise even half the potential shown by alphagov.

We're not all going to be down in Lambeth next week. I'll be in Helsinki for Frozen Rails, while James Mead will be learning about Top Down TDD in Clojure. If you bump into us, be sure to say hi.

Until the next time Harmonia chooses me as our Week Notes writer,

Tom

Recent

week-138

2011-09-11T13:55:00+01:00

Sunday 11th September

by James Adam

Week 138

It's so easy to get completely caught up in work that you lose sight of why you're working.

With that in mind, we've decided to make an effort to take that step back and talk about what's going on inside Castle GFR. We believe in transparency, so it's an obvious way to demonstrate that.

This week it's my turn. I'm already two days late, and we've got a lot to catch up on.

O2 Labs

After handing #blue to O2 Labs at the start of August, we've done a bit more work for them exploring how they can help developers to engage with other parts of their infrastructure.

I wish we could say more, but sometimes clients are a bit sheepish. Fair enough. Perhaps we'll give the project a codename.

The Office

For the past few weeks we've taken a break from that work to make progress with our new office.

After walking across most of London - twice - we found a good space just around the corner on Worship Street. Chris and I met with our solicitors to go over the lease and generally learn more about what we're getting ourselves into. We're hoping to move in within the next few weeks.

Harmonia, the Chaos Administrator

One of the fundamental ideas behind our company is that everyone involved should be a maker, but that doesn't mean that administrative chores can be ignored. We've tried a few different approaches for handling this, but have settled on a simple system that adds a sprinking of entropy into our operation.

It started as a simple script called chaos.rb, but we're pushing more and more into it as we find tasks that fit. For the curious, it's called harmonia.

Miscellany

Tom has been exploring a simple set of deployment recipes that leverage git, and we've been trying them out. There are a few rough edges, but it looks very promising so far, and it's very fast.

We've been using Highrise to give everyone visibility of what's going on in the company, but when someone forgets to BCC or forward an email, it causes a hiccup. This wastes time, so we've spent a bit of time thinking about other solutions, from a single shared mail account to some custom software. I have been spiking some scripts to automatically produce a single, searchable view of every email in and out of Free Range. There's nothing worth looking at yet, and we're still exploring what flow will really work for our company.

Recent

kalv-goes-west

2011-08-26T13:55:00+01:00

Friday 26th August

by James Adam

Kalv Goes West

It's been quiet here on the blog, which means that we're busy, for better or for worse. Regardless, it would be remiss not to take note of a small amount of shuffling on the deck of the Good Ship Free Range.

Our colleague and friend Kalv is leaving us. In September he'll be emigrating to the fresh, untilled soils of British Columbia.

Kalv has been a key member of our company right from the start. We're going to miss his business acumen and his drive & determination. His user-driven focus has been invaluable in a company composed entirely of technical people. We've learned a lot from him, and our loss is now Canada's gain.

We're sad to see him go, but it's going to be the start of a great adventure for Kalv and his family; we can't wait to hear all aboot it.

Recent

linda-reads-your-numbers

2011-05-03T18:21:54+01:00

Tuesday 12th April

by Kalvir Sandhu

Linda reads your numbers

UPDATE 3rd May 2011. We've taken this down for the foreseeable future. I do think there's some merit in a service like this but it didn't generate enough interest to warrant us maintaining it just now -- Chris.

As mentioned in our previous post last week we took a step back from client delivery so that we could play with ideas and new technologies. Whilst Timmy was being built in one corner of the office, Chris and I worked on a different idea involving calling a phone number to read out our important contacts.

Some of us in the office have been in situations where our phone has run out of battery and we've been unable to obtain an important number that we've needed. Yeah, sure, some of us sync contacts out to the web but when you're stuck somewhere without internet cafés or out late where everything is closed, you're stuck.

So with this problem in mind we built a thing - Linda reads your numbers. This is a really basic service allowing you to define contacts and allow you to hear them when calling a number.

You can sign up to the app for free and enter up to 10 important contacts. When you call the 0844 704 1542 number, enter your phone number and PIN you can get Linda to read out your numbers!

There is a lot more we could've done with it but we've decided to push it out now so we can hear what you think of it.

Calls to the number are charged at 5p a min on landlines and whatever your mobile company charge for 0844 numbers. We don't make any money from this number, it's a number provided by voipuser.org for free.

We had fun building this by learning how to hook up VOIP services to Ruby. For this app we used Asterisk as the open source PBX and hooked it up to Adhearsion and Rails to manage the dialpan and contacts. We will write up in another post a bit more on how this was set up and what we learned.

Go forth and set up your contacts so that you too can get Linda to read your numbers.

Recent

say-hello-to-timmy-printface

2011-04-08T13:55:00+01:00

Friday 08th April

by James Adam

Hello, Timmy

Update: Timmy lived a brief but glorious life in mid-April 2011. Timmy is offline for now, but you can see his glorious life in timelapse-tastic video below.

One of the perks of being part of Go Free Range is the opportunity to play with fun ideas for the clients we work with, but also for ourselves. This week the whole company has taken a step back from direct client work to explore some of the ideas we've had pinned to the wall for the past couple of months, and the first output of that is Project Codename: Timmy Printface.

~~Here he is, hard at work this very minute:~~ Here's a video of little Timmy running in April 2011:

~~Go to Timmy's page, and that image will update automatically, showing you the messages that he's receiving, live and direct. It's better than most of what's on TV, I'm fairly sure.~~

~~You can play along by texting +447716354419.~~

Timmy is offline for now, but if you're an O2 customer, you can sign up to #blue now to free your messages from your handset.

I should mention that this is a hack built on top of a beta service that we are still developing, and so we're very sorry if your message happens to fall down a crack. Sometimes it can take a couple of minutes for your SMS to actually reach the network.

If it doesn't appear after some time, however, let us know when you sent it, what it contained and the last few digits of your phone number and we'll try to trace what happened and use your feedback to improve the service.

Behind the scenes

In a nutshell, we've taken a simple message feed from the #blue API, and with a little bit of Ruby magic and some breadboards-and-wire fun, any messages that you send to Timmy are printed out pretty much immediately.

Where #blue knows who the person is, we can print their name along with the message; otherwise it's just the number.

Here's what it looks like from my desk:

The Waffle

Taking "the web" and printing is isn't particularly novel, and has been done to much greater and more practical effect already. And indeed, now anyone can.

However, frequently these projects are about taking what is current - tweets, blogs, and other digital artefacts - and bringing them into the physical world.

What I really like about Timmy is that this is taking two old, hacky technologies (SMS was invented in 1984 as a hack itself on top of the signalling pathways used to control telephony traffic) and gluing them together using something new.

It's like getting your grandparents to FaceTime each other.

But let's not lose our sense of perspective; it's a fun demonstration of a new way of dealing with your own text messages, now possible via the #blue API that we've been building with O2 for the last year.

The API

The #blue api takes these messages, which have previously been trapped in your phone like prehistoric insects in amber, and liberates them. Until you've done it (and unless you're a bit of a geek), you probably can't imagine the strange novelty of being able to run a curl command and suddenly be able to pipe your SMSes around on your normal computer.

It's like the first time you realised you could program, making a computer do whatever you can imagine and then describe; suddenly things become possible.

While we have always tried to provide the best possible user experience via the front end of #blue, but we've also always felt strongly about the potential of the API. We're excited to see what other hopefully-but-not-necessarily more practical applications that developers start building on top of it, to give everyone new and valuable ways to make use of the messaging services provided by telcos.

The API uses OAuth2 for authentication, and your messages are always private. You are always in control of which applications can be granted access to your messages, and this access can be revoked at any time.

The Gallery

Here is selection of our favourite texts so far - click to zoom in, see if you can see yours!

This was an impressive rickroll attempt:

Although, technically, Jason beat them to it; you can see his prior art in the first selection.

We have even received some actual art:

Beautiful, particularly given the constraints.

~~Keep your texts coming; send 'em to +447716354419,~~ lines are now closed, but don't forget - if you're an O2 customer, you can sign up to #blue now to help give us some more momentum in our quest toward changing how these huge companies treat your data.

If we have seen far...

It would be remiss not to mention the giants on whose shoulders Timmy is happily perched.

The original idea of connecting a small printer to a stream of information - the "Microprinter" - comes from Tom Taylor, as indeed does the actual printer we're using, which Tom has generously loaned. You can read about his original project from 2009 here.

The Ruby library we're using to send commands to the printer was written by Roo Reynolds, and is available on Github here. In fact, there's a little cloister of microprinter hackery, should you want to try something out yourself.

We went from the first moments of prodding the printer to what you see now in under a day, so hopefully this is a good example of the "Making Things Fast" idea that Leila Johnston has championed. See if you can spot a message from her new "Extreme Acts of Kindness" project in the selection. She was even kind enough to mention Timmy in her weeknotes. Thanks!

Incidentally, she collaborated with Roo on the Shift Run Stop podcast. It's a small world here around Silicon Carpark...

Recent

building-caffeine-monitor

2010-12-06T17:55:03+00:00

Monday 06th December

by Jason Cale

Building Caffeine Monitor

Wednesday 11th November saw the second instalment of Build Conference come forth in bloom. I attended this hand-made web design conference set in stormy Belfast, as I recalled on my own website.

Whilst I was there soaking in collective wisdom, friends old & new, we also had an offering of our own to launch that fine day.

Caffeine Monitor was an application built to track and display a realtime visualisation of caffeine consumption during the conference.

Sponsored by Campaign Monitor, we collaborated with Nicholas Felton who designed an infographic for the application (shown above).

Andy McMillan the man whose Herculean efforts make Build possible, conceived the idea and approached us to help make it a reality.

Application biology

The application consists of two main parts:

A secured form to capture drinks consumed.
HTML/CSS based infographic to display the captured data.

To do this we implemented or made use of the following:

Simple Rails application hosted on the Heroku platform.
HTML5 offline support using Rack-offline for manifest generation.
HTML5 local storage to record drinks when offline.
Javascript to sync with server using JSON.
iPhone / iPad optimisations for data collection views.
CSS3 Media queries to target multiple display resolutions.

Collecting data

The way we collected data had to be really really simple. Andy had lined up some volunteers to help out on the day, whom would record drinks picked up from the refreshment stands or in the market at lunch.

They would likely be using iPhones or iPod touches to collect the data, so we made the following assessments about the user interface:

It should be really simple.
It should to be really responsive.
It should collect data with or without internet connection.
It should recover from losing focus (such as getting a call).
It should be free of distracting or unnecessary interaction.

NOTE: In the next section I refer to unsynced items which means drinks recorded in the local storage but not on the server, I’ll discuss that whole business shortly, so please bear with me until then.

Drink capture screen on an iPhone

A simple interface

Two big buttons, one for each drink type and counters which increment with each click. These give instant feedback that drinks are being recorded and are enough information to remove anxiety, without distracting from the (next) primary action.

The counter has the total for each drink type, with the number of unsynced drinks in parenthesis. Once drinks are recorded on the remote server these transfer into the main count.

Periodically these counters are updated with data from the server to reflect any drinks recorded by other users.

Made responsive

By upgrading the form to post via ajax we prevented a page reload. Firing off an asynchronous request (handling response via a callback some time in the future) allows us to return control back to the user ready for the next submit which could be a mere fraction of a second later.

In fact we went a step further by using local storage to store the drinks. Recording the drink locally meant the posting of the drink data could happen completely independently making the form responsive whilst simultaneously achieving our goal to support offline transactions.

Offline data collection

To achieve this we used HTML5 local storage, extending form submission to record a drink in the local database instead of posting to the server. We note the type and time (so it can be posted to the server at leisure) of each drink purchased assigning a UUID and status flag — marking it in as unsynced.

Periodically posting all the drinks to the server, which responds with drinks it has saved, we mark those drinks as synced. The UUID helps to ensure that drinks aren’t accounted for more than once.

Removing unnecessary interaction

Firstly we ran the app as a fullscreen application on the iPhone by setting the following meta tag inside our <head> element.

<meta content='yes' name='apple-mobile-web-app-capable'></code>

Then we disabled the ability to zoom (by double tap or pinch)

<meta content='width=device-width; initial-scale=1.0; maximum-scale=1.0; user-scalable=no;' name='viewport'>

Combined with our super simple interface we hoped our users could tap away and the application would respond as we intended.

Testing in the wild.

Riding home on the tube one evening I sat and recorded a few hundred drinks underground. Once I surfaced the data started syncing as expected, but subsequent button presses started to lag and the app ground to a halt. We had written javascript that generated an ajax post for each unsynced drink, which was overwhelming the app — oh dear.

Modifying our approach to post a single payload; we deployed and all those pending drinks immediately synced and the app sprung back to life — Result.

Building the Infographic

Nicholas supplied us with a HTML/CSS template which became the basis for the infographic. The raw drink records were recorded in a database, exposed as the relevant statistics then placed into the template.

Scaling for devices

The template intended to run on a projector so was designed at a fixed size. A couple of days prior to the event we decided to share the application URL publicly on the day so resizing to fit regular browsers would be an ideal.

Sitting in the Belfast Malmaison pairing with Chris back in London, we re-wrote the HTML/CSS to make this a little simpler and added a few media queries to help compensate for the shift in display size.

Browser rounding inaccuracy.

The bar chart to display consumption over time was initially implemented with column widths set as a percentage of the entire page. These percentages turned out as fractions (width: 10.60%).

The large layout and browser tendency to round fractions caused cumulative inaccuracy, which manifested visually towards to the end of the bar-graph. Resizing the browser just made it worse — we had to fix it.

We re-wrote the markup to group everything into a hourly blocks (which were further divided into 15 minutes and 5 minutes sub-elements). This meant we could group and position everything within each hour, constraining errors to that (much smaller) boundary instead of over the total.

This also meant the whole bar graph scaled rather elegantly by comparison; we took the chance to combine the schedule information and time axis into each hour block so they scaled in line as well as being grouped semantically.

On which note ..

Steffan Williams recently wrote an article which highlights some of these rounding inconsistencies; however I think with a little thinking they can be overcome sufficiently.

Working offline

Rack-offline intentionally doesn’t work in development environment.

Whilst it makes sense to only work in production (so you don’t have to deal with cache when writing code) we were caught out by this a few times.
There isn’t a clear way to remove offline-cached application content.

This makes testing a little cumbersome especially when you have to restart your Rails application with each change running in production (see previous point).
Serving offline pages without .html works fine on iOS devices.

At first, we thought we’d have to create a static page in order to get mobile safari to work offline, and most google results suggest explicitly using .html when calling the page.

We found simply using standard Rails routes (without the .html) the iOS devices would still honour the offline content.

Securing the application

Because we wanted a ‘desktop’ iPhone app (i.e. fullscreen mode) we ran into a few problems in regards to security:

HTTP Basic authentication prompted for username/password on every request.
Putting username & password in the URL prevented offline support.
Cookies aren’t shared across browser and fullscreen applications.
Redirects aren’t followed in fullscreen so we couldn’t use a form to auto login.

Our solution was to use security through obscurity, having a special URL that we could load and save onto the users iOS home-screen. This URL would pass a secret token to the Rails controller which would authenticate transparently to the user.

Visiting this URL would place a token into the page markup which Ajax requests would use to authenticate without needing user interaction.

We ran the application over SSL to prevent snooping of the secret URL.

On the day

Arriving at the Waterfront to setup on the day, we got the application displaying on two 52-inch flat screens with a further feed running to the main stage projector to display during the breaks.

The volunteers’ were setup with the application on their iPhones and iPods and they quickly dispersed to track the first drinks of the day.

Live changes

Viewing the application on the flat screens I realised the contrast between the type and background colour was a little low. Tweaking the CSS, I deployed the change with the knowledge that all the drinks would be recorded locally. Once deployed the screens refreshed with the information looking much sharper.

Just before lunch, using the data collected so far I calculated the average rate at which attendees we’re consuming coffee so I could adjust the bar-graph inline with the distribution of data. This enabled me to make the spikes in caffeine consumption appear more dramatically on the infographic.

Just as planned

It was great to see everything working so well. The hard work to ensure stability paid dividends, and the reaction the application received from attendees and online was universally positive.

The application is frozen to reflect the conference day so you can check it out.

Thank you

Our thanks go out to Campaign Monitor for making the application possible, Nicholas Felton for the design, Andy McMillan for conceiving and organising the whole project, as well as getting us on board. Thanks to all the volunteers on the day. Caffeine Monitor was great fun to make, to see it come alive on the day.

Special thanks to all the caffeine addicts at Build Conference whom without their endless need for a pick-me-up the project would have been a disaster.

Cheers!

Recent

hello-you

2010-11-17T12:34:00+00:00

Wednesday 17th November

by James Adam

Hello, you

Welcome to the part of the internet where we write our thoughts about building software. We hope you find it interesting.

That is all (for now).