The Bird’s Eye View: Issue #7

Ollie is on holidays, so I’m taking on the Bird’s Eye post this week. Man, he picked the wrong week to head off foreign. I’m just back from lunch on the Grand Canal, and it is b-e-a-utiful out there! I’m looking forward to a weekend of sun in Dublin, but I should get some more work done first!

Tomás has continued working with CIS this week. He is making backend changes to their “Eolas” publication system, and adding some functionality to the customer front-end “iCIS” to improve the user experience too. The categorisation of projects in iCIS will change slightly which will make the underlying system more flexible going forward. He has also joined me on the new CIS marketing website, and we have merged existing functionality into Umbraco CMS. This means we can integrate the marketing content closely with the underlying iCIS project database. The result will be a seamless experience for the anonymous visitor through to valued subscriber. Users will have a consistent UI and site navigation will be greatly improved.

The LUAS LeapCard Integrated Ticketing System has kept Martin busy this week as development and testing continues on TaxSaver Tickets.

Trevor has been refining our internal time tracking systems. This has given him the excuse he’s been looking for to use some more Python. Right now he say’s he’s having a little love affair with Requests. We’ll leave him to that…

Requests takes all of the work out of Python HTTP/1.1 — making your integration with web services seamless. There’s no need to manually add query strings to your URLs, or to form-encode your POST data. Keep-alive and HTTP connection pooling are 100% automatic, powered by urllib3, which is embedded within Requests.

I have been working with both the European SharePoint Conference and CIS. We will be launching a 2-for-1 voucher on the ESPC site next week and we’re getting the delegate registration form finalised for the 2014 conference. Continuing on our lean approach to designing the new CIS marketing website, I am still trying to focus on the content first, and let the design come from that, and I am continuously communicating with the CIS team as we iterate.

I discovered Connect Ireland on my twitter stream today and it looks like a really good idea.  Through your connections, help create jobs in Ireland and receive a reward from the Irish Government.

It’s basically a referral programme for international businesses that settle in Ireland. While on the site’s homepage, I scrolled to the footer and was intrigued (read: easily distracted Mossy) by a really cool timeline feature.

Upon closer inspection (taking a look at source) I discovered it’s an open source tool called Timeline JS that can be used anywhere, and can be easily integrated with a Google spreadsheet too. You can expect this to crop up again in one of our future projects, in fact Martin has an idea for it already and plans to start some prototyping over the weekend.

In lighter news (pun intended!) myself and Trev had a gym outing this week. We use the  Guinness Bicentenary Centre – being in the GEC gives us access to use the Guinness Gym. I’m used to excercising a lot for Triathlon, but the gym has left me a little tender as I wouldn’t alway be hitting certain muscles when running, cycling or swimming. Trev says he’s fine, but I don’t believe him 🙂