This week has been my first week at the Raspberry Pi Foundation. It’s been a week of lots of new things, from a commute by bike and train to Cambridge, to meeting new colleagues, to getting my head around a new organisation. The week has been great. In some ways it has flown by, but sitting here on the train on the way back to London it also feels like it’s been a while, a sign of settling well I think.
This week I have:
- Figured out a new commute and settled in to a new work culture.
- Spent some time planning for and considering my role. Research Manager is a new role so there is a lot to be defined and I’m in the great position of working with people on all the most interesting questions that have emerged out of the first few years of Raspberry Pi and Code Club.
- Got to know my new colleagues. As I have a new role that will work across the organisation there has been lots of opportunity to meet people and get to know them. I’ve met most people from the foundation now, but there are lots more people at Code Club to meet. Everyone has been really welcoming, and it’s great to be working with such smart and passionate people.
- Set up my laptop (a few challenges with getting it onto Linux so I’m Windows 10 until someone figures out how to get Grub onto a Dell 9350), getting onto email, Slack, Dropbox, Xero and all the other online tools used.
- Admin to make sure I know my way around systems and the office, and am on the system to get paid.
- Started work on the 2014 annual report for the foundation. I’ll be leading this, with lots of contributions from others to document the activities and impact from the last twelve months.
- Started a research review pulling together what’s out there in terms of insight into how learning about computing and digital making happens.
- Met one of the Raspberry Pi Creative Technologists. These are exceptional young people who have applied to the foundation to take part in a scheme of mentoring and support to develop their ideas in computing and digital making. Own shared with us his project to create a rope for aerial acrobatics that generates music from the performer’s movements. The Raspberry Pi engineers gave him lots of feedback and ideas to successfully make it happen. It was at an early stage but already very impressive.
- Joined in with preparations for BETT at Excel in London next week. It’s the first time Raspberry Pi & Code Club have a stand, and there is lots planned to make it an amazing one. Free workshops every half hour, lots of people speaking, and involvement in other stands and events. It will certainly be a busy week.
- Caught up with ‘the slackerati’, a group of like-minded people put together by Doug Belshaw on a Slack channel. We’ve been talking about how we might evolve our ideas sharing and conversations into action.
Next week I’m in the Cambridge office on Monday continuing much of this work, then in London the rest of the week for some working from home and lots of working at BETT.
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