This is week #492, it is the sum of six consecutive primes (71 + 73 + 79 + 83 + 89 + 97). There are also over 1950 skyscrapers over 492ft tall.

This is our last week before an extended summer holiday. Little things will get done over the next few weeks, but it we won’t have any weeknotes in the meantime. We’ll be back to (semi-) regular broadcasts in September.

This week turned out to be pretty interesting. We have two new project leads; one down in Australia doing some charts for business intelligence and another potential dashboard project.

The project in Australia is dealing with a company’s cashflow in and out on big construction projects. Giving them a weekly overview of the discrepancies will help them gain an overview of their profitability and float. We will start with a simple prototype to make sure we can connect to all their internal payroll and project systems, then if they are happy continue to build-out something more detailed.

The dashboard project is only an introduction email. In the next few weeks we’ll have some meeting to discuss how we can help. That could be as simple as consulting on a few software recommendations, or maybe some paper mock-ups that a designer would take further. Maybe they have an internal development team and maybe they don’t?

We also spent some time this week pair programming to get more data flowing into a centralised system to help link it all together. In doing so, we learnt a new term, ROAS, Return On Ad Spend. There is that famous quote, “Half my advertising is wasted, I just don’t know which half.” In the digital world, it is ‘easier’ to attribute the cost to acquire a new customer and how much they in turn spend. Which is the return on the cost to acquire them. If that’s below 1, then you’ll be losing money and need to change your strategy.

Finally, our top secrete project continues to mature and we continue to polish all the corners. The goal is to soon get a few more alpha testers in and we harden it before turning it over to people outside our direct circle of friends.

Bric-à-brac

As part of analog.is we designed a potential notebook fo Olympus Mons mountain on Mars. It is 2.5 times taller than Mt. Everest. If you were to walk up its gentle slope, you’d be walking into space. It is also so tall, that the planet’s curvature affects your ability to see the peak from the base and the base from the peak.

But, we learnt this week about Rheasilvia, the tallest peak in our solar system and it is on an asteroid. It is only slightly taller than Olympus Mons. You can compare all the different heights of peaks in our solar system on Wikipedia.

We have been experimenting with an old idea to do some image style transfers. After some experimentation, we’ve realised that we probably can’t do what we wanted, but at the same time opened our eyes to something new. That’s a whole post in itself.