Our last weeknote was July 17th, that’s nearly 6 months ago. That was also our last bit of writing. The best course of action now is to do a small recap, declare weeknote bankruptcy and start with fresh weeknotes in 02016.
Week 255 has several interesting properties. 255 is a repdigit in base 2 it is 11111111 in base 4 it is 3333, and in base 16 it is FF. It also shares its name with 255 Oppavia a main belt asteroid.
The last 23 weeks have been a blur. We managed to start and wrap-up several small projects with some folks in Australia. Most of these have revolved around scripting Google Drive Spreadsheets. The customer was completely running things out of Google Drive, but wanted many of the features and functionality they were used to in other spreadsheet tools like Excel. We worked on a project with a security company in the UK, helping to get them off the ground with some design projects, identity work and basic web app UX. Since then, they’ve grown the team and brought many of these tasks in-house. Hopefully, in a few monthly they’ll be a house-hold name for web/node security.
We’ve also been working on several internal projects, which are in various states of completion or have been stopped altogether. 02016 should see a few of these come to light. Week 255, we managed to setup our Apple Developer Membership. We can now ship iOS apps, which will be interesting to see where this leads. There is a whole article on the pain and joy of this. (Short story, we’d rather use the web, but two of Apple’s newest and more intriguing devices do not have web browsers, so we have started to create “artisanal web browsers” for these devices. Which isn’t the best solution, but improves their usefulness). Having a developer membership also means we can experiment with Apple Wallet and Web Push Notifications too.
Calendars for 02016
You can’t head into 02016 unprepared for the year! We’re big fans of paper and code, so we’ve written some code to automatically generate different types of yearly, quarterly and weekly calendars.
All the code is online if you want to modify it, but of your just want to print something yourself, all the 02016 files are there too.
- A4, four column year calendar split by quarters
- A7 notebooks, one per quarter with 3 monthly calendar are room for notes.
Travel
Over the last 23 weeks, we’ve been to Brighton for the last dConstruct conference. We gave a half-day workshop about data visualisations in NYC for the O’Reilly Strata Conference and then went to Manchester to give a talk about going from Digital to Analog for NUX4 conference.
Invoices
We only have 1 outstanding invoice, which is partly because we haven’t sent it off yet. There is always that possibility that we’ll be adding 1 more hour, so we put it off and put it off. It will be the first thing we do in the new year to settle that debt.
Then there are lost hours. Over the years we’ve picked-up projects in all sorts of shapes and sizes. For the most part, they’ve all been fun and interesting! Every once and awhile, we’ll get a random call or email from a past customer asking for a minor change, some files they’ve lost or a quick change to a font or logo. We’re always happy to help – within reason. The problem is when someone connected with the project needs something completed ASAP, but has no idea of the financial arrangement you setup with their boss. They just know we did the work and if there are questions contact us, so they do. This leads to issues where we are doing work their boss hasn’t authorised or doesn’t have a budget for, so we can’t really invoice. These are lost hours which we can’t recoup. We do keep track of this unpaid time for several reasons. Firstly, we need to calculate these lost hours into our hourly rate. Secondly, maybe in the future our customers might get some funding and we can get refunding these lost hour. Thirdly, we want to know which of our customers are continually asking for small fixes. With the data we can go back to them and negotiate some sort of maintenance contract or retainer based on their average hours in the past.
Back on Track
For 02016, our goal is to get back on track with our weeknotes. Even if they are fortnightly, atleast we’ll continue some sort of publication pulse with interesting links, news and updates.