Omnibus 02014

Thursday, January 1st, 02015 at 14:41 UTC

Over the last 12 months, we’ve posted 14 articles along with many more weeknotes.

Overall, this was fewer than the previous year, but we’ve pretty much had our head-down throughout 02013 and 02014 trying to build-up another company. This meant we didn’t have as much time focusing on our own needs, wants and ideas in 02014 as we’d wanted.

Throughout 02014, this was our year of randomness. We did a lot of random things, wrote about some fun and random topics and gave away 4 prizes for our quarterly contests, most of which were about randomness. The plan for 02015 is to be the year of Paper. It was suppose to be the year of paper for several years now, but this year it will be. We’ve been gathering-up paper related topics and ideas for a long time and now is the time to focus.

Welcome, 02015, the year of Paper.

Past Articles

Over the year, we collect notes about some of the previous articles we’ve written and try to keep things updated. Here are a few notes worthy to be mentioned.

Spimes

In September of 02014, we presented at the dConstruct conference about Spimes and the future. The audio is available online at http://archive.dconstruct.org/2014/humans where you can listen to the presentation. It covers a lot of what we’ve been thinking about with our Spimes. After the event, a few people came up to us and discussed some of their ideas and thoughts. Some of which we should fold back into the story somehow.

Paper Calendars

We fixed a small bug in the code to generate the A4 quarterly calendars. Part of the problem with the Quarter system is that a year sometimes has 52 weeks, nicely divisible by 4 and sometimes it has 53 weeks. 02015 to 02016 roll-over has this problem. According to the ISO standard, the first week of the year, week #1 is the week with more than four days in it. January 1st, 02016 starts on a Friday, so it only has 3 days in it. This is part of week #53 in 02015. It feels strange to start a year calendar on January 4th, but that’s the definition from the ISO.

Survey Archives

We wrote awhile ago about our Survey Archiving workflow. Since then, our code and workflow have changed further. Rather than crunching the equations within the Django code-base, we’ve moved it to some external scripts which uses the Pandas system. This means that everything starts with a CSV file. These are pretty well established file types. Minimally structured plain-text files have been around since the start of computing, so they are a much safer storage format than various SQL dumps. That’s not to say we don’t save those too, we are just focusing more and more on the intermedia CSV files which allow us to go forwards through computations, but also backwards into responses.

Metrics and Dashboards

Back in late 02013, we published an article about Metrics and Dashboards. A year later, we’ve done a few projects for companies here in Iceland which are focused on dashboard design, or more specifically, redesign. We’ve been cleaning-up and stylising much of their boring numbers and tried to put more of a focus on the important information, cleaning-up the colors, fonts and layout. There are probably several more articles, if not a short book on the topic that could be published when everything is done.

Rather than writing a short paragraph about what has changed, we’ll put together a longer post in 02015.

2× Paper

Back in 02009, we wrote about 2× paper. The idea was to pack twice as much information into a space as possible by filtering the light through the standard red/blue 3D glasses. It turns out that someone recently used the idea when bringing a 3×5 card into their exam. It certainly isn’t a new idea, but great to see others also discovering the same idea and actually putting it to use! If you wanted to reproduce the same affect, then you can download some of test print sheets we use.

Travel

In 02014, we managed to get to several countries all for conferences or workshops. We started the year in Lisbon, Portugal for UX-LX. Then went to NYC for Smashing Confernce a few weeks later. In September, we made our yearly pilgrimage to Brighton, England for dConstruct. We thought that was going to be all for the year, but two last minute offers came through and we went to Olso, Norway for WebDagene and then to Berlin for Beyond Tellerand.

What to expect in 02015

The year 02015 is meant to get away from the computer screen a bit. We want to spend a good portion of time doing more physical things. So we’re taking a longer, harder look at paper. In 02014, we started a small side-project in 02014 called Analog.is which focused on beautifully letterpressed notebooks. We completed a successful kickstarter campaign for our first run of LatLon notebooks, Island series. In 02015, you can expect the next in the series to arrive, but more on that later.

The plan is to go back to full-time project work rather than focusing so much on a single customer. This means much more scrambling around and worrying about cash-flow, but it is much more interesting and exciting to diversify the types of projects. So keep an eye on our availability forecast to see our workload. As part of this, we’re looking a further developing two of our internal products into something more consumer friendly. Mosfell is pivoting a bit after some disappointing tests and Virkisfell might see the light of day this year if we can find a few organizations willing to become development partners.

We expect 02015 to be a quieter year. The first half will be a scramble for customers while the second half will see some shifting of workloads behind the scenes. That said, you should still expect some interesting and exciting new ideas to be coming out of the company.

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