Week #454
We were doing well, then got two days of strange news that pretty much knocked us off the rails. Not bad news or good news, just very, very unexpected news.
Until then, we did manage to continue to get a bunch of work done on our Stealth project. That has been going well, chugging along. We think, within the next week or two, we can start to ‘dog food’ the product and use it for ourselves. Then, we’ll find all the pain points and start to smooth things out.
We are a bit late to the party, but on this project, we tried the ‘new’ CSS Grid specification for laying out our columns. Oh boy, we should have done this much sooner!
While we were waiting for various parts to be approved or designed, we took a little bit of time on a different project. That’s Stealth Project number 2! Hm… maybe it is time to get back into some codenames.
We also got some news that has set us back a bit. We were just starting a new multi-year, multi-project adventure with a small UK company. It was still in the very early collaboration stages, but sadly, they had to bow out. Not all is lost, yet, but the deadlines for our first prototype goals are now scuttled.
Week #455
This week has mostly been working on Stealth Project #1 code. Working more on the website, logo design and a little back and forth on some API changes. We brought a few more people into the fold and are looking into the next steps.
On the survey front, we collected more data from the government’s website in CSV format and reconfigured it all into lots of nice charts and graphs with both historical and cross comparison to other organisations.
We also started our next survey collection which runs for all of November. This is for high-school students. It is our highest turn out yet. The service continues to grow slowly year-over-year.
Bric-à-brac
These last two weeks have seen several interesting paper related projects pass through. Here are two we find fascinating.
Paperang is a tiny thermal printer that you can remotely send print jobs to via their app. From photos on your phone, to todo lists and more. It is a not-so-curated version of the ill-fated Little Printer. For those who love the analog, this is a wonderful product.
This is basically Pocketmods with a bit of access to your local application databases. It is another step towards the papernet, what’s not to love! What we disagree with is that this is an a daylong attempt at replacing your phone. Paper is an amazing tool to augment it. Digital does somethings well and should keep doing those things, but analog is great at other things. Knowing which context and when to choose one medium over the other is the key.