Tuesday, November 3

I started the day substituting for Jutta, who is at home on two week’s sick leave. I began her Pitching Ideas course with the second year as I intended to go on: with as little computer use as possible. I showed them Trello, which they had mostly used last year, and then challenged them to plan a party for the media department. They then laid it out in Trello, moved one seat to the right, looked at their neighbour’s Trello board, and stood up and made a one-minute pitch of that idea.

We did several versions of this with me introducing more rules and stipulations each time until everyone had to do a pitch that was exactly one minute. To my delight several students managed to get a pitch that was between 58 and 62 seconds.

Fifteen minutes later I began the final week of Mobile Apps with the third year. One group had finished their project. They demoed it and went home. A second group needed help. A third group diverted their energies into doing an instant project for Lars and I threw ideas around with them for that. The fourth group needed no help at all until 16:00 when they showed me a problem to make my head spin.

They had three plugins that they needed to work together and didn’t. I plotted out the complete workflow, made two fairly lamed suggestions that turned out to be over-complex and inherently fragile. Finally I had a brainwave that I understood but couldn’t explain. So I sat down with them and coded it, and thirty minutes later the whole thing worked. Even better Marcus and Mats understood what I had done and why it had worked. They also understood a lot more about WordPress plugins, and how to rewrite them, than they had before.

Now I am leaving Arcada feeling pretty pleased with myself. It has been a long time since I sat down and wrote php at the speed I was thinking it. I walk out to an amazing sky, and notice that I am not the only person photographing it.

When I get home I will show Irma who will say “Facebook is full of those, its a Scandinavian autumn sky”, and she will be right. I will type out Chapter Twelve of the book, the last chapter of Part Two, and then have a shower.

I will go to bed, fall asleep immediately, and not wake up till 6:50 tomorrow morning.