528 is a triangluar number of T32 and shares its name with a minor planet 528 Rezia. The minor planet was discovered by Max Wolf on March 20, 1904 along with two others, 527 Euryanthe and 529 Preziosa, on the same day.
A few weeks ago, we got an email from someone asking us if we knew or how we managed to get our QR Code onto a prop package in a BBC TV show Mum. We had to go look. In the first few minutes of the first episode, we found this:
Sure enough, that links back to our website. It is most likely a 02009 article we wrote called “What are 2D barcodes“. It has very high ranking in search engines and people just grab the first example they can find. Sometimes we end-up in the strangest of places!
Two smaller projects got some attention this week, the BBC/Nesta human values project and our concreters down in Australia. Usually, once a week we sync with the teams, gather a lists of todos and we take time to do them. Now, with both projects all the obvious tasks are done and as the customers use them to add content or track time, we’ll certainly find some bugs, issues and changes. We’ll then do another round of changes and clean-up and repeat until we’re done. Ultimately, we expect those projects to take another week or two, then we’ll move on to other aspects or projects.
It was a year ago this week that O’Reilly shutdown their conference division. We lost of bunch of fun projects and opportunities, but it wasn’t unexpected given the circumstances. Hopefully, a year on, most people have landed back on their feet and we can re-make some connections and rekindle some old projects.
Several people we know and follow on social media have posted their Open Office Hours. You simply book a time slot and chat. It has been a great experience and we are very keen todo the same. Our biggest problem is that we are only 1-2 days a head on our schedule. With strange deadlines, emergencies and other random events, it is hard to pin down a 30 minute window a week into the future. But when we can, we want to reciprocate and let others contact us too. This week, we had a great chat about autonomous vehicles, virtual reality, material conference and more.
Starting on Thursday, Iceland implemented a three week lock-down. That doesn’t affect us that much on a daily basis, but it is always disheartening knowing this could happen any time and travel, family and friends are still a ways away from normality.
Top Secret Project is moving into the final phases and it feels like we are right there on the edge of announcing. A meeting is booked late friday night to naildown some release plan. We’re both excited and nervous about finally, getting this out into the world.
Our internal project codenamed Apavatn got some attention this week. There are a lot of models representing blobs of data. In our first pass, we made it easy to CrUD (Create, update and delete) them with basic info. Now we want back add started to add all the fields available. Not glorious work, but there is a sense of progress when things start to come together. Our goal is to migrate some old data over and by the end of the year be using apavatn internally.
There is an old saying “The cobbler’s children never have any shoes”. Well, people who work on websites for others, never have the time to work on their own! The week, we are slowly, slowly making changes, one page at a time. A few months ago, we tackled the (optional.is) homepage. It was too unwieldily. Now, it is probably too basic, but that’s fine for now. This week, we added dark mode support for several navigation pages. Next, we’ll tackle the footer or the articles pages like this one. We have a design, just need to clean it up and implement it. Rather than one big swooping change, this is more of a gardening exercise of always tweaking something.
Bric-à-brac
The volcano in Iceland keeps producing some amazing content. Here is a video of a drone nearly not making it through an exploding caldera.