Week #524
This week was pretty much a total write-off. Due to the winter break and sickness, we didn’t manage to get much done. Our focus was on the few surveys that are still ongoing and getting ready for the next round starting in March. That’s when we have our new general staff survey. Most all our surveys are within the education sector, but now we are offering a standardized general staff survey for any work place. We’ve done this for a few years now, and it is slowly growing.
Since November 02019, we’ve spent either half-a-day to 3 days a week on site for a client. In that time, we’ve been helping them with their data. How it is collected, queried, displayed, used and reported. We’re proud of what we managed to do. From streamlining weekly reports about KPIs for investors and the team, to ad hoc tasks like finding cheaters, or estimating when a re-engagement push notficiation might be most useful. We even started to work on some regression analysis to determine what it is that keeps players retained in the long term. All this was going to feed into the upcoming SKAdNetwork changes Apple is implementing. But alas, it was not meant to be. As hard as the whole team worked, on Monday the client went bankrupt.
As contractors, we’re in the pile of invoices and bills with everyone else. Once they liquidate the company, we’ll see how much, if anything, we manage to recoup. Working with the data, this was no great surprise and we were well aware of the risk this might happen. Even though this hits us financially, we’ll be OK. We’ll learn from this experience and add another variable into the hourly rate calculator: likelihood of bankruptcy modifier.
As the saying goes “Once bitten, twice shy”, we know what it feels like to loose months of hard work and invoices. It was a bit like a bad bet, once you are down one invoice, you work harder the next month because your efforts could seal the deal to get your back pay. But there is an inflection point at which you are just throwing good money after bad. We’ll probably stop sooner next time there’s something in the air.
Cubes Game
One thing we did manage to accomplish this week was to make a simple and fun little iOS app. This is an idea we’ve had in our head for awhile now, but only managed to read-up on a few of the code blockers.
The idea is to get each row to have a one of each color, but as you ‘rotate’ the colors on each square, you are actually rotating the 3D cube in 2D space, which changes the others squares too. It was a great little experiment, but as a game, it is a bit limited in what you can explore.
Pool Numbers
A few weeks ago we took some photos of the hand-painted numbers at the swimming pool. They are so nice, we traced them as vectors. Not knowing exactly what todo with them, we put them up on GitHub for anyone to download and use in projects. Along with 0-9, we added X, V, I to make Roman Numerals.
If you use the numbers, let us know. It would be great to see where they end-up in the world.
Week #525
Every two months, we need to collect all our invoices and receipts to turn into the accountants. It is the start of March, so time to get finanicially organised! This is one of those tasks that doesn’t take too long if you stay on top of things, but it is also one of those hidden-costs types of tasks. You are required to do this, but at the same time, it isn’t billable time. This is the overhead of running a business.
Meeting week. After last week’s client crash bankruptcy, we’ve had more time. That quickly got filled with meetings. Our Australian plumbers were so happy with the time tracking tool, we’ve got another project todo something similar for an Australian Concrete company. We spent some time hashing out the details of the proposal, scope and budget. We also met a few times about our ‘top secrete’ project and when we plan to launch that one. Then Friday we had a call about our NESTA project. It was a short WordPress training session to bring everyone up to speed on when things are ‘pages’, when they are ‘posts’ and how to configure all the little things like categories, tags, menus, etc. Then a friendly meetings about Material Conference collaboration.
Every week, we look at our publishing schedule, and every week we push something further back. This week, we managed to get some writing done! There is one article queued-up for Monday, then we’ll put the finishing touches on two more. Our goal was to have a longer article go out early in the week, then shorter weeknotes on Fridays. Then life gets in the way and internal publishing projects seem to be the first to get cut.
Spring is the busy time of year for surveys. This week was no different. We started two more surveys. One general staff survey which for 4,000+ participant and a parent survey for the City of Reykjavik with 5,000+ participants. It is early in the survey, so we’ve sent out emails to everyone and started sending SMS reminders. We’ll keep you updated in our next weeknote of the progress.
Invoices
3 Lost
2 Outstanding (sent this week, still fully within the acceptable time to have not yet paid)
This week @bjornjeffery had an interesting comment about pricing.
Either free or expensive. That concept has been bumping around the office now for the whole week, and there is something certainly in there for us going forward.
Bric-à-brac
There are two great bits of advice in this short clip. First, why you shouldn’t try to bend your art to what your audience wants. Doing so dilutes your vision. Secondly, if you aren’t a little uncomfortable, then you’re not challenging yourself or your craft.