This is a triple weeknote. It always feels like we are apologising for never quite getting these out on time. So here we are again, behind the 8-ball when it comes to these weeknotes, but this time we have a good excuse or two. Week 459 was Thanksgiving in the US of A and we got lost in all the festivities and then Friday came and went. So of the team have been fighting sickness (or multiple sicknesses) these last three-weeks, so being a few heads short, makes it also hard to get these things out of the way.
It also means that we managed to get things done, but in much smaller chunks of time. Therefore the types of tasks aren’t big project ideas that take a day to sit-down and focus your attention on. They’re more administrative tasks, which need to get done anyway.
Week #458
This week we did manage to get to the printer and get some A1 posters printed. These are our 2020 wall calendars (more info on that coming soon), some wrapping paper test prints, and our SF Symbol fonts poster, which was quickly obsoleted the next day when Apple released 1.1 version of the font.
We also made some progress on our stealth project. Getting some bugs worked out and a few things hardened on the website.
This is the week we also met with the Data Protection Office of Iceland. One of our many projects collects personal information and small medical measurements. Our customer wanted to sit-down with everyone and review the process, what we are collecting and how best to handle the sensitive information. Their recommendations should be coming before the end of November (which came and went, so hopefully soon)
Week #459
We continued this week working onsite with a customer. They had to cancel week #458, so we doubled-up this week to keep things moving on their end. We’re really enjoying the pair programming aspect knowing we’re actually imparting some knowledge rather than just doing the work and throwing the code over the fence never to know if anyone is using it.
Also some basic prepping for 2020. We control the @icelanders twitter account. We had grand plans for what could be possible, like the @sweden account. Alas, like many things, twitter has morphed and changed and our priorities shifted elsewhere. But we still queue-up holidays, old icelandic months and other announcements into tweetdeck for all of the following year.
On the stealth project front (which really needs a good codename now), we continued to develop some API end-points in tandem with some developers who are using them in our demo app. Things are very close to having a complete ’round-trip’ solution that we can start alpha testing both internally and with a few close friends.
Week #460
This week has been a lot of behind the scenes work prepping for Material conference 2020. We sent out a basic newsletter, added a new speaker and are finalising the details of another. We’ve also been reaching out to a few locals who would make amazing short speakers. It really feels like things are coming together and that buzz of excitement is starting to stir.
On the calendaring front, we have two small apps for iOS: Red Days and Emoji Calendar which list out the next holiday in a fun way. Originally designed as Watch Complications, the app came along sort of because you had too. We found a curious bug this week and set about rectifying the problem. On November 30th was St. Andrew’s Day, a public holiday in Scotland, but because it was on a Saturday the substitution day was set for the next Monday. The bug in the code was that on Sunday, the date for St. Andrew’s Day was now in the past and therefore pushed to the following year, but then the substitution algorithm would show anything for the Monday. It was really an edge-case bug for 24h, but we’ve close that hole and tidying-up the code to make it easier in the future.