Unfortunately I’ve been ill with acute bronchitis this month which meant not being able to attend a few events I’d been looking forward to and not sleeping very well which meant not much time to do anything that wasn’t essentially.

I have some posts I’m working on around class-based CSS systems and working with datamapper solutions that allow you to work with SQL directly compared to ORM abstractions but they aren’t ready as yet.

I did attend the CTO Unconference which was another good event but with less actionable ideas than previous sessions. There were a few conversations about good development processes and what core things a technical solution should provide. We didn’t really get into costs and focus but my view was that people generally didn’t think in terms of cost-benefit and that there is a lot of zero-interest-rate legacy that we are now going to have to deal with in a very different financial era. Simplicity and a minimum of moving parts seems important.

I’m a big fan of developing in the open and I think the organisations I’ve worked for that adopted this practice were the best places I’ve worked at for communication and design. Ross Ferguson (a former colleague) is compiling a list of public organisations that use open roadmaps which are a really interesting idea (if probably a bit scary for organisations that don’t have disclosure or transparency requirements)

Gitlab does open support tickets (Background jobs failing, Background job results not being available) which was something brand new to me. Again it seems quite scary but on seeing it working it gave me a tremendous amount of insight into the problems and what the Gitlab folks were trying to do about it. Something that no amount of strongly worded emails to support addresses or account managers has ever gotten me.