Week #204

Friday, January 9th, 02015 at 20:02 UTC

This week could best be described as meetings punctuated by short, brief interludes of work. Planning and meetings have certainly been the soup du jour this week. We had 10 meetings, with 10 different organisations.

We also put an ultimatum on Virkisfell, one of our internal projects. There are funding opportunities in mid-February, but before that we need some development partners. We’re not going to write the application if we don’t have industry support. So in the next two weeks that is one of our goals. If that doesn’t happen we’ll put this project on ice until the time is right.

The other major projects we’ve been working on this week has been sorting out our taxes for the last two months of 02014 and preparing our annual report for the accountants. It is quite cathartic to go through the whole year’s numbers and know where you stand both financially, with your time and customers. Off the back of that, we’ve been writing our annual report article which breaks down most of our time, spending and other metrics about the company.

We also organise a select meet-up at the local university. So this week we planned out the final four meet-ups for this quarter and sent off the information to the group. It is good to fix the dates, topics and invited speakers for the rest of the school year. It’s a big relief to now have that all nailed down.

In-between all the meetings, writing and planning, we did pull out a very old project and have begun to push that forward. Over the last few years we’ve doodled up some of the unique graphics and designs. One of which has sat in our “potential t-shirts” folder for awhile. Since we haven’t had large blocks of time to focus on code or writing, we pulled out a few designs and continued to freehand doodle. It is almost at the point where we’ll get some prototypes made, so that’s exciting to see come together.

Bric-à-brac

One of the interesting facts we learnt this week was about the Author, Diplomat and WWII aviator Romain Gary. From the description of his life, it sounds a bit like he’s the French equivalent of Ian Fleming and James Bond. He is the only author to have twice won the Prix Goncourt award for the best and most imaginative prose work of the year. What makes that special is that you are only allowed to win it once. The first time he won using his own name and the second was using a pseudonym.

Since we’re all setting back into the office, we’ve been rearranging things and getting spatially organized. This video was passed around the office featuring a tiny apartment with three scaling rooms.