Week #687 & #688

Friday, April 19th, 02024 at 22:22 UTC

Week #687

We started the week with a few potentially new projects down-under in Australia. Most of these projects fall into custom software development: Data Bridge category. Companies have data in one silo and need to get it into another. For example, exporting data from an inventory system and bring it into a packaging software. APIs to export, massage that data into a new format, and APIs (hopefully) to import it into something else. Software Plumbers at your service.

Wednesday morning, we met-up with some other seasoned VR folks and had a chat about what’s up, what new and what everyone’s looking forward too. It’s great to get a lay of the land from out-side your own bubble and to mingle a bit more to let people know what we’re up too.

On Thursday, we sent our ◍ Quarternotes 02024Q2 newsletter. This is our quarterly newsletter covering some of the happenings in the company along with some interesting links.

We ended the week with two interesting project meetings. The first was like a phoenix rising from the ashes of a defunct project that crashed and burned a few months prior. Some of the team have dusted themselves of, and started again and want our help. This was a great first-meeting and we’re excited to work on the project.

The second meeting was even more interesting and top-secret. The first 5 minutes to a swerve we weren’t expecting with a crazy potential new project, but the pendulum swung back to the tasks at hand. It was great to meet Walid and his team. What we proposed as the software solution is a pretty “quick win” and we’re itching to get started. At some point, we should convince the client to spend less time in meetings and use those hours to explore in prototyping. We’re nearly there.

Week #688

On Monday, we did the swap-over dance with one of our surveys. This is the last month of big survey work in the spring time. Things are going smoothly as we continue to email, sms and call participants.

On Tuesday, we sent out the ⪮ Good Morning s03e04 newsletter. This is our growing newsletter that covers just 4-topic each episode, no self-promotion.

As we near the end of island.is (Iceland’s Single Sign On Service) for non-governmental agencies, we’re moving to TOTP (Timed-Based One-Time Passwords) from a QR code into some Authenticator app. Most of our customers are not expected to be so technical that they will already have an app. That means some very verbose, clear instructions on how to set this up.

The last two weeks we’ve ramped-up our free time on a quazi internal project: Q-Arriba. We’re very happy how well and fast it has come along. I guess that’s what years of experience gets you. You get to skip all the previous mistakes and get straight into the harder stuff.

On Friday, we had our fortnightly PETALS sync. We have our first external customer onboarded and will use it with their team and send some feedback. This is a big step, because previously we could break things and no one would notice, now we’ve gotten get much more professional in our deployments.

Fluxcapacitor

It is fascinating to look back at a weeknote from 6 years ago. Some of the comments feels like yesterday, others feel like a world away, yet they happened in the same week.