We’re back! After a wonderful two-week family inter-railing adventure around Europe taking in Barcelona, Lyon, Zurich, Ljubljana, Salzburg, and Stuttgart, we arrived back home just before midnight on Tuesday.
Our favourite place? Slovenia (Ljubljana and Lake Bled). Lyon was a close second, and Barcelona third. Salzburg was good, but we’ll not be hurrying back to Zurich or Stuttgart.
Since being back, I’ve recorded Episode 107 of the TIDE podcast with Dai Barnes, and worked from Wednesday to Friday on the MoodleNet project. That’s included:
- Catching up with email, etc.
- Performing a sprint retrospective and reviewing Mayel’s work around specifying the initial data models.
- Screening applicants for the MoodleNet backend developer (Elixir) position. From 70+ applications we’re planning to have informal conversations with nine, and have talked to two candidates so far.
- Setting up a server to get started with forking the Pleroma code base.
- Participating in the internal branding sprint.
- Meeting with Garnet Berry about presenting at the ALT conference next month.
- Moving away from Trello in favour of GitLab issues, Changemap, and Teamwork.com, as documented in this blog post.
- Talking with Mary Cooch about taking over the @moodlenet Twitter account and sunsetting the existing moodle.net site while sunrising the new one. Much more on that to come.
Next week I’m working Monday to Wednesday on MoodleNet, then a half day on Thursday before joining my family in Devon for a long weekend at the in-laws.
This week I’ve been:
- Sending out Issue #314 of my Thought Shrapnel newsletter. This one was called ‘Final Holiday Countdown 🏁 ⏲️ 🏖️ ’. Thanks to those who back me via Patreon plus those who continue their support via Gumroad!
- Playing You’ve Got Crabs! as a family for the first time, which was hilarious. It’s by the same people as Exploding Kittens.
- Recording, editing and releasing Episode 106 of the Today In Digital Education (TIDE) podcast with my co-host Dai Barnes. We entitled this episode ‘Keeping track of all the things’ and discussed MoodleNet milestones, Seth Godin’s approach to learning, assassination markets on the blockchain, keeping track of articles you want to read, and more!
- Working on the MoodleNet project:
- Finishing off UX Milestone 2 with Outlandish, which proved interesting after Matt, their Head of UX, went off on paternity leave. This was expected, however, and Rob another UX guy, stepped in seamlessly.
- Responding to community feedback on the screencasts, and collating it on our Changemap.
- Starting to put together a job landscape for a back-end developer.
- Meeting briefly with Steve Watt to discuss MoodleNet sustainability.
- Testing out the new Jira interface. It’s fine, but we’ve decided to go with GitLab issues as it’s less confusing for our purposes.
- Meeting with Michael Shaw, Director of Tes Resources about potential ways we can integrate.
- Submitting our MozFest proposal.
- Curating interesting things I came across on the Thought Shrapnel blog during the last few days of July. I’m taking a holiday during August, so only a few links to share:
Next week, I’m wrapping things up on Monday, and then heading off on holiday from Tuesday for two weeks. We’re interrailing and taking in Barcelona, Lyon, Zurich, Ljubljana, Salzburg, Munich, and Stuttgart!
Image by Matt Artz used under the terms of the Unsplash license
