Seven items reached Done this week. Eight more were closed having never been started at all, and that second number is the more interesting of the two. A journal that counts only what was finished will always flatter the week it describes; a fair one has to include the things that were thought about properly and then declined. Deciding not to build something is work. It is simply the kind of work that leaves nothing behind except the absence of a mistake.
The most substantial item was housekeeping of a kind this practice has been slow to apply to itself. The working notes for this very website — the conventions it is built to, the numbered amendment process by which its specification is changed, the constraints of the platform it runs on, and the rules governing what may and may not be said in this journal — had been living in a machine-local store, outside version control. They worked. They were also invisible from a second machine, unreviewable in a pull request and, as it turned out, wrong: the check run before moving them found them recording the controlled specification six versions behind where it actually stands, and still describing an amendment as awaiting incorporation some weeks after it had been incorporated.
Nothing had gone wrong as a result, which is the only reason the arrangement lasted as long as it did. Notes of that sort do not announce their own decay. They drift, quietly and at no visible cost, and the bill arrives on the day somebody relies on them. They now sit in the repository as ordinary files — carried by any clone on any machine, reviewed in pull requests, subject to exactly the audit trail the rest of the project has had all along. The corrections went in alongside them, which is the half that actually mattered.
— On the record —A note kept where nobody can review it is not documentation. It is a rumour that happens to be written down.
A new engagement opened midweek, and the notable thing about it is how little there is to report. It is unpaid work for a junior chess club — only an annual domain recharge is chargeable — and by Sunday it had produced a drafted services agreement, a drafted data-protection agreement, and not one line of anything else. That is deliberate. The agreement is not executed; until it is, there is no basis on which to begin, no agreed terms under which to hold anybody's data, and nothing that belongs in public. The eight items closed as Won't Do this week all belong to this engagement — options weighed on their merits and declined. They will keep. When there is a signature to describe them under, they will be described.
On the e-commerce side, one thing closed that this journal was carrying only last week. The discount codes going missing somewhere between an order being placed and the system meant to honour it — reported here as hunted and not yet caught — had their investigation closed this week. The trace identifier mentioned in the same breath last week, the one that would have made that hunt considerably shorter, did not move at all. It remains open, and it remains worth finishing for precisely the reasons given then.
For the retained veterinary practice there was a single item, and it was the same small discipline as ever: another clear-down of accumulated contact-form entries. It takes minutes, produces nothing anybody can see, and is among the more reliably valuable things done for that site all year. Personal data one no longer needs is not an asset but an obligation, and much the cheapest way to discharge that obligation is not to be holding it.
What stood still is quickly told, and worth telling. The internal developer tool was not touched, for the second week running; it still waits on the short last step between documented and released. The family-history application's cloud foundations — the hosting, the database, the pipeline — have been open since April and moved not at all. The trace identifier, as above. None of this is quite drift: there were a finite number of hours and they went to the notes, to a new client's paperwork, and to the people who were owed something. But a record that lets its stalled work go unmentioned is not a record. It is an advertisement.
Seven items to Done, eight to Won't Do, and a week whose largest single body of work cannot yet be written about at all. The practice's own notes are in the repository, where they can be argued with. A new client has an agreement drafted and nothing built, which is the right way round. An investigation is closed, a store of personal data nobody needed is smaller, and three long-running things stand precisely where they stood. It does not photograph well. It rarely does.