We fell off the weeknotes wagon 17 weeks ago with #430 being the most recent weeknote. It’s not like we weren’t working, we just got busy with other things, summer holidays and the next thing you know it’s been 4+ months!
We’re going to declare weeknotes bankruptcy and cut our losses over the last 17 weeks. Lots happened, some good, some bad. We sent invoices, got paid, built some things. Now, hopefully back to business as usual when it comes to weeknotes.
Material Conference
This week Joschi and I have been working hard behind the scenes prepping for the March 20th, 2020 Material Conference. We’ve confirmed a few speakers, updated the website and will be launching Early Bird Tickets and closing down the Blind Bird ones.
We’re getting excited about how things are shaping-up! In the mean-time, we’ve been going back through the archives and working on an improved site that goes a bit deeper into each of the talks.
Surveys
This week especially, but certainly the last few have been dominated by survey work. Two surveys from O’Reilly media have been conducted and analysed. Our role varies from survey to survey. In the past we’ve analysed the results, created charts and written drafts and final copy. We’ve looked at salary surveys as well as general adoption surveys. The two we most recently finished were about SLOs (Service Level Objects) and Serverless adoption. Both should be published in the next few weeks.
It is also the start of the school year, so we’ve been vigorously prepping our student surveys for Icelandic students. So far, we’ve imported 16,000+ names to take the survey over the next 9 months. This has been our flagship product which we repurposed for school staff, student parent surveys along with young student surveys using only audio and images and now a general staff survey.
Over the last few years we’ve been prepping and updating a lot of code to comply with the GDPR and now that we’re there and things are running smoothly, our day-to-day role will be shrinking.
Triagemail
Our little personal iOS email app project got some love this week with some translations into dutch, german, norwegian, icelandic and portuguese. Next week is Apple annual fall event. We’re expecting iOS 13 to be officially released, which in turn means we can submit Triagemail with all its new features, like Dark Mode.
Misc.
In-between tasks, we’ve also been updating some code for calendar generation and prepping some 2020 calendars. We usually print them in Q4 so we’re ready to get organized for the next year before the holiday season. We’ll show-off more of the changes in the near future and post a link to the GitHub repo for anyone to download and update it as needed.
We’ve also been working on a few top secrete projects and one less top secrete that we’ve been calling Flynn. Which is turning out to be a good name in general. Maybe this code name will just become the product. We don’t want to say too much right now, but it has been an adventure digging into some new technologies and expanding our knowledge professionally.
Back in weeknote #430, we talked about how we started to dust off the old office space and were moving back in… life always throws you a curve. We’re still dusting things off, but still intend to move back in, get our crazy wall setup and get back into the rhythm.
Bric-à-brac
Red Obsession is an old documentary about the Chinese obsession with French wine. We saw it on a local film festival many years ago. It came-up again in conversation sometime this week, so if you haven’t checked it out, you should.
Ctrl Shift Face has been making AI ‘deep fake’ videos for a while. We are watching someone working in a gym slowly getting better and better at their craft with each video. This one of Bill Hader morphing has been making the rounds this week. You’ve probably seen it, but we’ll keep it here for future reference.
Snowstorm on a coment: This animation is a series images from the Rosetta spacecraft, taken from a distance of about 13 km from the comet 67/P Chuyurmov-Gerasimenko, and put into an animation by Twitter user @landru79. As the spacecraft moves around the comet we see the landscape change, but you can also see stars moving in the background, and flakes of ice and dust much closer to the spacecraft flying around!