On the projects front:

• Longridge is getting off to a good start. I’m hunting down contributors, doing introductions, firing off emails. I’m also beginning to write some scripts just to get my hand in and to see if they line up with what the production crew are expecting. Not quite where I wanted to be by the end of Friday, but the team seem pleased where we are, and I had several good meetings with them during the week so I’ll take that and carry that momentum into next week.
• Dent is going back to the drawing board, but possibly not for a month or so, given Longridge combined with impending holiday. It turns out the current build just won’t behave; I spent some time with a J-Link really prodding at the thing and no amount of work in gdb would solve my problems. So we’ll start again in October.

I spent a little time getting myself quickly up-to-speed with some new technologies this week - always good to keep my hand in, and at least one of them was an audition for Longridge:

• I finally wrapped my head properly, clearly around CSS Grid; gosh, what a breath of fresh air. It makes two-dimensional grid layouts just a breeze to write. I also managed to understand its relationship with (and differences to) flexbox. After a long period of reading docs, I now had understanding in my hands. Good.
• To that end, I managed to tear out all of Bootstrap from this site - which had used it for positioning. Replaced the lot with CSS Grid and Flexbox in under an hour. Very happy with that - and also happy that the trade-offs for users of older browsers are, to my mind, totally acceptable.
• I continue to poke and prod at Javascript frameworks, and spent an evening (off-duty) kicking the tyres on Svelte. I’m interested in Svelte for how it approaches the reactive-UI pattern, but also how it removes the load on the client by just… being a compiler. Given the Javascript community’s fondness for (or, perhaps, reliance on) transpilation, going the whole hog doesn’t seem that much of a difference. I quickly ported my personal ‘hello world’ of reactive UIs to it, and enjoyed the process, the clarity, and the light page load. I’m still not sure how I feel about the ‘magical’ binding and slightly higher need for simple stores; I found myself using stores and subcription in places React would force me to explicitly pass functions and state down, endlessly, which to my mind is both good and bad., Still, I like its approach to reactivity and its single-file component structures, and especially its approach to performance and webbishness.

And that was the technology I played with; not project-oriented, but useful for me in lots of ways, and worth sharing here, as a log of what I get up top.

A good week - but gosh, the next two are going to be busy.