No big developments this week, but lots of nice things.
Local Welcome
I spent a very nice afternoon at the Local Welcome offices on Friday doing some very high-level planning. We have a new Product Owner starting soon, who is really excellent, and was lovely to watch them run sessions that successfully pulled out concise agreement from a wide variety of viewpoints.
Membership
I hit a bit of a breaking point with membership last week, realising that I’m just trying to do way too many features with too many hats on at once, thinking about the technical architecture as well as design, UX and IA, product management and trying to find potential users and researching with them.
So I’ve taken a bit of a step back from the codebase, and reframing last week’s work less of MVP development and more as a technical spike. I’m armed with architectural decisions that I have made (such as using DB tenanting to make it SAAS as well as open source, and a better idea of what the object model should be). I’m now going to spend some time this week with my head firmly in Adobe XD, designing some wireframes that I can take to potential users and do some user research with to test my assumptions.
Fun times
I’ve booked my accommodation and travel for Dutch Decompression, and London Decompression has now sold out! So very much looking forward to both of them.
I went to Awesome Tapes From Africa at Mick’s Garage last Friday for some nice dancing. There was a very big mirrorball. It was very middle class.
I had a family Sunday, with all my nephews and nieces in tow, with their parents and grandparents. Wholesome fun was had with a Maize Maze and gocarts in the Suffolk countryside.
Work
I should be starting a new contract next Monday, for some much overdue money-earning work. I haven’t signed the contract yet, so won’t talk about that until my next note.
Links: Football
I forgot I had decided I wanted to include links to nice things I’d seen on the internet in these. Let’s start that again.
Despite the fact that I really can’t get myself to enjoy football, I get into the politics surrounding it, and my work around communities and politics has shown it to be important.
Here are some good things that this interest has brought me to.
Tifo Football is a good youtube channel providing good explainers of the high levels of the world’s leading clubs, which can provide a great perspective on world politics from a football point of view. Here’s an overview of something I knew a bit about: Why Abramovich Wants to Sell Chelsea, and here’s one on something I knew nothing about: Shakhtar Donetsk’s Rinat Akhmetov.
On the other side, COPA90 shows the grassroots fan base side of football, and I like their Derby Days series. Again, 1 video about something I know a bit about: North London Derby, and one I learnt a lot from (I knew nothing about Hamburg really) HSV v St Pauli.
In other East London local football news, it’s been good to hear from my garden Leyton Orient (positioned 2 streets away from me) is having a better time after getting rid of Francesco Becchetti as their owner, and the Clapton Ultras have shut down, and appear to be throwing their weight behind Clapton CFC, so I should probably support that.
For more content you can see all my posts tagged with 'note', all of my posts, or read about me.