Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ

Tuesday kicks off with our team stand-up; we're onto twice-weekly team stand-ups now, individual projects will be more regular. We try and pick up the Digital Programme Guide ideas from last week but hit a bit of a block. We need to narrow things down to something we can build but also ensure it is something we want to research. Is it releasable? Original? Useful? Who's the audience? Lots of questions. We agree to divide up - with some of us looking at the technical infrastructure, and Theo and Vicky continuing to explore user needs and goals. We'll then combine it all later in the week. Tony demo's the Arduino RFID reader that he's got up and running - it will be the core technology of the Digital Friendship project - and we start to sketch out the end-to-end architecture, data flows and user interactions.

George is in W12 most of Wednesday at R&D leadership meetings and Theo and Sean are working through the final design tweaks on the inbound links service. We need to do some load testing and then leave it soaking for a week or so before getting stakeholder approval to put it live. Quite a lot of Digital Friendship scoping today - in its initial form it is a physical token that is used to initiate online friendships - this meeting is mainly technical, getting a common understanding of what we're building and ensuring we know (approximately) how we're going to do it. There's an Arduino/RFID module, a desktop app and a website. It all seems achievable.

We've started to use our new task management tool in earnest. All our projects are in there so we give everyone a quick walkthrough of how to use it - there are no major protests which is encouraging. Theo and Vicky have been locked in a small room distilling the essence of programme guides, magazines and iPads. They've compiled around ten core principles which the product should fulfil - these will guide what we build and how we build it. I think all our projects would benefit from something similar. We now have a candidate architecture and data model; next up is some investigation into feeds and data to support some of the UX vision.

The quiz sprint wraps up. Duncan has finished off his XMPP, Strophe, Bosh, CORS pubsub demo and Sam has built a timed quiz using the LIMO JavaScript library we've developed. We just need to write it all up and then start prepping for next months project meeting in Hamburg. We've encountered some connectivity issues with our ingest chain which is blocking the remaining tasks on the inbound links work. Chris and Sean are investigating the root cause but I think it means we'll overrun into next week. George heads off to Zurich on Thursday evening for some initial meetings around a big EU project.

It's Friday, and Duncan's managed to get an OS X desktop app interfacing with the Arduino. Chris N has started working on the friendship request/approval process, writing an initial implementation and test cases (TDD). Chris B has been spending the odd spare hour on a small spike into using Google Translate to translate subtitles on the fly. We're still getting connection failures on our ingest chain but hopefully we'll resolve them before the day is out. The week has flown by so I'm frantically trying to finish off a document, then get some handover notes to Tris for next week, then publish these.