Weeknotes 53

We needed a “quick” prototype to test with some research participants this week. I wasn’t sure what technology to use - I’ve been favouring static stites with a bit of JavaScript lately, but after staring at the wireframes for a bit and asking #roos for some reckons I decided I’d be better off building some of the trickier parts (persistance, authentication) rather than trying to fake them out.

I started a new Rails 7 project and its been pretty smooth sailing so far. The passwordless engine gave me a basic authentication system fairly quickly (although faffing with SendGrid and Heroku to send the magic link email took the bulk of the time). I’ve been able to use the rails scaffolds to get started quickly on some of the other forms and pages. It feels good to be writing some code and familiarising myself with some recent Rails features.

F-‘s nursery was closed on Wednesday so we put our wellies on and headed down to London Zoo for a bit. There’s three young Sumatran tiger cubs at the moment and it was wonderful to watch them playing and learning how to hunt with their mother. We also enjoyed an extended stop in the butterfly house. F- really liked looking at the “spotters guide” cards and trying to find each butterfly.

A-‘s parents flew home on Thursday. It was very sad to see them go and the kids have been a bit unsettled since. It’s quite a change of pace when 2 extra adults leave our small flat!

N-‘s been asking a lot of questions about death and dying recently, and getting sad about the concept that other people (or himself) won’t be around for ever. For fairly obvious reasons I don’t have any particularly comforting words of wisdom or insight into what comes next, but it does feel good to have “grown up” conversations with him about these things and share some moments of sadness or reflection. Essentially I boiled it down to: “we’re all going to die, but hopefully not for a long time, and we’ll have some good times while we wait”. Justin Welby’s probably safe in his job for a bit.

Some of N-‘s questions might be prompted by the school’s discussions about Rememberence Day. According to N- “one hundred and sixty soldiers died in the war”, I didn’t have the heart to tell him the horrible truth.