We skipped weeknotes #483-486 because of summer holidays. That’s over and we are back to work. It took a few days to dig ourselves out of emails, todos and meetings, but we’re back on track.
The fall is usually quite busy for us. There is a lot of planning around the start of the school year. We are usually contacting and collecting information from several hundred schools in Iceland. With COVID-19 several schools are under lockdown or a bit slow to start. We also are moving to a more self-service setup to help comply with GDPR. This reduces the amount of personal information that we are handling via different channels. With any Data Protection Report, we need to list all the parties that have access to personal information. If that is sent via email, then our hosting provider, the backups, etc all need to be listed. We our customers upload their own lists directly, we can shorten our list, and therefore any liability. If you start to think about personal data like nuclear waste, you do you best to contain it and minimize how much you need/collect and how many things are touching it along the way!
Over the last month we worked more on our top secret project. Hopefully within the next few weeks we can talk more publically about it. Next week, Apple have a small event, Facebook have their Oculus event and TechCrunch Disrupt are all happening. Which means any announcement is atleast now pushed back until the week after that (Future Weeknote #502)
We onboarded several more people to the system and are continuing to work out the kinks. It has been great to hear their feedback and ways we can improve our process in places.
Another customer of ours has been busy too. They requested to see if we have more hours available to dig deeper into their data to get more insights. We’ve been doing our best and spent a bit more time in their office. It was interesting to look into the changes they will need to make after iOS14 is released and all the ad networks will have problems tracking users (which has now been delayed until early 02021). Apple is offering up a solution in the form of a ConversionValue. That is a 6-bit value that is used to encode your data. It could be a single value from 0=63 or 6 Boolean values or something in between.
With a bit of machine learning, we looked into what were the main day zero predictors for valued customers. Then based on those attributes, we can send a conversion value with six Boolean values hopefully predicting the worth of any ad campaign.
Finally, we picked-up a small prototyping project before the summer break, but are only getting back to it this week. We are working on a Time Tracking integration with the xero.com accounting platform. I’m sure there are lots of pre-existing tools to capture the data, but what we are working that makes it unique is a weekly/monthly reporting tool. As their projects progress, they need to have an overview of their cash flow situation on projects according to the time entered. So far, we have managed to make all the OAuth connnections and slurped out some data, but need to check-in again on how and where some of the time entry data is to be stored.
This week we also invested in an external Bluetooth keyboard. We’ve been on an older MacBook Pro with a Touch Bar. It has no dedicated esc key and the first gen butterfly keyboard. Switching back to another keyboard, we’ve forgotten how nice a good keyboard is!