Weeknote 40/2018

Open Thinkering Uncategorized, Weeknotes, weeknote, work

This week I’ve been:

  • Sending out Issue #318 of my Thought Shrapnel newsletter. This one was called ‘Blisters a-go-go’. Today’s newsletter is delayed due to something I discuss below! Thanks to those who make Thought Shrapnel possible via their support on Patreon.

  • Working on the MoodleNet project:

  • Getting ready for Mayel de Borniol, our Technical Architect heading off on holiday for three weeks! He’s left Alex Castaño with plenty to get on with!

  • Documenting the fork of the Pleroma codebase we’re planning to build upon. Alex created a new branch in the repository, started creating the architecture documentation, added some comments to schemas, and started work on an ActivityStreams library.
  • Meeting with colleagues about registrations, as well as wider issues around how MoodleNet will work with Moodle Core and MoodleCloud.
  • Adding GitLab milestones. A lot of them are placeholders for now, but it helps us with dependencies.
  • Meeting with our COO to discuss project resourcing.
  • Putting the finishing touches to our (accepted) Mozilla Festival session which will be in London right after Mayel gets back.
  • Asking Mary Cooch some questions about the existing moodle.net service for an interview to be featured in an upcoming blog post.
  • Contributing to the Culture Champs organisation of Wellbeing Week (next week!)
  • Investigating who we could hire to do security testing of MoodleNet pre-MVP.
  • Meeting with Emilio Lozano to discuss approaches to project management.

  • Writing a post on the new technical area of the MoodleNet blog about our decision to use Elixir (Alex’s post based on Mayel’s docs)

  • Recording, editing and releasing Episode 110 of the Today In Digital Education (TIDE) podcast with my co-host Dai Barnes. We entitled this episode ‘Coaching and bullshit’, discussing career advice, coaching, the ‘lower left’, a bullshit receptivity scale, post-truth, walking, Google activity controls, and more!

  • Meeting with my co-op colleagues to plan upcoming gigs. Amongst other things, we’ve started on a comic to explain how to setup a room for remote participation!

  • Curating interesting things I came across on the Thought Shrapnel blog:

  • Insidious Instagram influencers?

  • The end of ‘meritocracy’ at Mozilla
  • Is Google becoming more like Facebook?
  • Bullshit receptivity scale

  • Seven coaching questions

  • Helping with 6th Morpeth Scouts:

  • Recording the proceedings of the Executive Committee meeting (as Secretary).

  • Performing the role of ‘catcher’ on the ‘mini-twilight’ held on Thursday night.
  • Leading a team as part of Operation Twilight on Saturday. Essentially a huge game of hide-and-seek across a 26km walk – great fun!

Next week, I’m working four days for Moodle (Mon-Thurs) and then doing some co-op work on Friday.