If the previous week was about laying foundations, this one was about extending the practice across a wider front — five active projects spanning new product research, greenfield development, enterprise e-commerce, client IT infrastructure, and a measure of community volunteering besides.
The most consequential development was the kick-off of a brand-new internal project: a quantitative sports analytics platform. The ambition is multi-phase — combining statistical modelling with exchange API integration to identify value opportunities in football markets. We completed a substantial block of foundational research: data sources and APIs evaluated and compared on coverage, update frequency, and richness; a deep read of the academic literature on Poisson modelling and the Dixon-Coles adjustment for low-scoring outcomes; and a careful investigation of the tax, legal, and exchange policy implications of operating such a system as a UK limited company. The infrastructure and architecture spike concluded alongside, so that implementation tickets can now be written with confidence rather than guesswork.
Off the back of that research, the solution was scaffolded — a .NET 10 / C# 14 codebase in Clean / Onion Architecture, with the core domain models in place. The hosting environment evaluation is in progress; Azure Container Apps emerged from the research as the target platform. A CONTRIBUTING.md and a small housekeeping pass ensured the technical documentation reflects the confirmed .NET / C# stack rather than the earlier TypeScript / Node.js exploration, and the CI/CD pipeline setup is queued and ready.
On the family-history web application, the CI/CD pipeline story remains in flight, with several subtasks still to land — domain registration and DNS, SSL/TLS provisioning, secrets management, and a smoke-test deployment to validate the end-to-end pipeline. The hosting and database provisioning continues alongside, with App Service, Azure SQL (with spatial types), and Blob Storage all being stood up in the UK South region.
— On a new initiative —From zero to researched, architected, and scaffolded inside a single week.
The e-commerce client engagement saw another productive sprint. The remaining payment method mapping configuration changes were completed across all environments; further integration bridge global config updates were deployed and verified working in the live pipeline; a colleague's pull request on a related egress bridge service was reviewed; and the internal incident ticket was updated with a full post-mortem of what happened. Regression testing of the goods-in application against the UAT environment, with warehouse stakeholder involvement, is now in progress — the kind of thorough, cross-functional validation that gives proper confidence ahead of a production release.
On the client IT infrastructure side, a security report for a client's infrastructure was completed, and a SharePoint account-switching investigation was resolved. A few items sit in the pipeline behind them: speccing out an automated X-ray-to-SharePoint upload workflow, setting up an additional website admin user, and updating business listing opening hours ahead of the May bank holiday closure.
And on the community front, the treasurer handover for a local organisation made progress — initial contact established, with a follow-up call to arrange.
Fourteen items shipped to Done across five projects; three more in active progress. A new product initiative moved from zero to researched, architected, and scaffolded inside a single week — a quietly satisfying return for seven days of work.