Week #504

Friday, October 9th, 02020 at 13:31 UTC

We started the week chatting with Mark Thiele about his Stay Curious events. It has been a difficult year (so far) for his main events: Beyond Tellerrand. Stay Curious is his little experiment to make sure things don’t get cold or irrelevant while we all wait for the day we can meet-up again in person.

Test Suite updates

For our survey tool, we’re rapidly updating the self-service model, but one thing that got left behind was the test suite. It has been a great refresher. We updated the code to handle the changes to the way we pull our random samples, but in doing so, we also realised that many of the tests, while working, are just out of date. Maybe in week #505 we’ll take a second pass at the tests and add more to test all the new functionality and changes.

There probably is some adage that if you change your code and the tests still pass, you probably aren’t testing the right stuff. 👩🏻‍⚖️ Guilty!

XERO SSO

To minimise the amount of data we are collecting, saving and managing, we are using the xero accounting software’s Single Sign-On solution to let employees login via OAuth on our time tracking app. This authenticates them against the payroll database, which is exactly where they are about to save their hours. It is working well, and we don’t need to manage any user table or keep things in sync with each new hire or departure.

It looks like we have a🚦green light for this project to move forward. We estimated around 70 hours all in all. We’ve sunk about 15 hours in the paid prototype to prove it works and can be done on dummy data. Now we’re expanding and refining everything over the next few weeks.

🤫 Secrets…

The top secret project is still going behind the scenes. We randomly fell backwards into two companies we know who needed our solution. We’re going to onboard them into the beta program soon to get their feedback.

Invoices

No delinquent invoices. We are very lucky that everyone pays fast. Of those we sent out for the end of September, only one has not been paid and they always do before the month is up.

Bric-à-brac

https://twitter.com/Extinct_AnimaIs/status/1313497491715747840
https://twitter.com/TaylorLorenz/status/1312172630770769921