Ok, so it’s been a while since my last week report. Sorry, habits are hard to form.

Family flew back from our Colorado trip, landing Sunday morning. The great thing about “computer work” is that one can do it anywhere, so I was able to work while I was away. The bad thing about “computer work” is that one can do it anywhere, so I was working while my family were on holiday. This is really hard to do in a satisfactory fashion: work outstrips available time, one is not with one’s family while THEY are holidaying, and the resulting conflict between what one must do and what one should do leads to stress. At least, it did for this one. (Bitterly amusing: was easier to take calls while on the road in Colorado than when 10m from my home in New Zealand; the Vodafone coverage at Goat Island was abysmal)

A busy week but with little progress on MacLean and Higgins. I did, however, manage the Mix and Mash judging and a trip to Wellington for the Library Information Advisory Commission (LIAC), and managed to informally acquire a new project (codename: Bagley).

Bagley is for a large international company, and will be delivered offshore. I’m helping a friend with it, and it promises to be both large and fun. So far we’ve passed through the “oh my god, it’s going to happen!” stage and are pondering the myriad of details that we will be bringing together. We’ve started the conversations of how many of which type of person we’ll need, which is the fun fantasy part of the project. In the next few weeks we’ll nail down the specifics and budget.

I love BERG London’s weeknotes and have resolved to follow suit myself. I’ll do it for the rest of this year and see how it goes. So, onto it!

Monday was when I wrote the talk I gave on Tuesday to Orion Health. They have regular hackathons (though they don’t call them that, it’s the idea of setting developers and other coal-face makers loose to build things for a few days, then report back). I was their first speaker for this hackathon, and was given a very wide brief—every topic I raised with the development manager there seemed to work. So I worked backwards from what I wanted to accomplish (firing people up at the start of a hackathon) and decided that I had to point out how awesome and important software people are (they are). I had been listening to an In Our Time episode on The Dawn of the Iron Age, was still struck by Ben Hammersley on Moore’s Law, and so I mashed up some O’Reilly-esque themes of early adopters and unevenly-distributed futures with these things on the surface of my mind, and came up with 50 slides.