Week 532 share’s its name with the year 532, in which Emperor Justinian I orders the building of the Hagia Sophia. We were lucky enough to visit in 02011 before it was converted back into a mosque. Just a month earlier in January 532, the Nika riots happened in Constantinople. Anger among the supporters of the most important chariot teams — the Blues and the Greens — escalates into violence. For the next five days the capital is in chaos. The fires that start during the tumult result in the destruction of much of the city. The insurrection is put down a week later and 30,000 people are killed in the Hippodrome.
Week 532 has a minor planetoid namesake, 532 Herculina and week 533 share’s its name with 533 Sara and NGC 533 galaxy. Week 533 also shares it’s name with Weeks 533 a 500-short-ton capacity barge-mounted crane.
Week 532
The week started with a call to the liquidator handling the bankruptcy case we’ve been pulled into as a claimant. It is highly unlikely we’ll ever see those invoices paid. We’ve also come to the realization of how the company was structured. The highest-value assets, all the Intellectual Property, isn’t owned by the company we did work for. So if they manage to sell that, it will go the shareholders of that company, not to the liquidation. It was a smart move to set it up that way, but any glimmer of hope is quickly fading away.
This week we also started jotting down everything we remember regarding the structure, data and flow. Since the company is bankrupt, we are open to reuse a lot of that knowledge, so it’s good to have it documented somewhere.
Tuesday was Apple’s Spring event. The long rumored AirTags were finally released. That’s a discussion in and of itself for later.
We sent out our Q2 quarterly newsletter. Sometimes it feels like we sent it out into a blackhole; no one replied and even a few unsubscribes. This time, we had a small call to action at the very end and a few people actually took us up on it! Thanks to everyone who’s booked an Open Office Hours slot!
Thursday was the first day of summer in Iceland. It is a public holiday, so this week was broken-up into a 3 day and 1 day week.
We rounded out the week fixing a few bugs for the Australian plumbers project and Australia concreters! The concreters are onboard for stage two of their project, so we finalized the proposal and sent it off.
Week 533
Our top secrete project had a small scare late last week during an onboarding. The software was working fine, but then stopped installing. After digging into the problem it was unique to an operating system update. This will forever be a chicken-and-egg chase between us and them. It was the first glimpse of the fragility of the tool, but also demonstrates the power. Luckily, a work-around has been found (for now), and we continue to tweak until we can announce more.
Summer has officially arrived and we managed to get out of the office and meet some friends for a picnic lunch. It was nice to chat with others beyond our everyday projects. We even managed to help out with some SSO issues using island.is.
This week we started some Open Office hours. We sent the link to everyone who is a newsletter subscriber and a few folks booked a time already. Today, we learnt more about Employee run Trusts and the demise of the European Super League! We’re looking forward to having more great discussions in the weeks to come!
The rest of the week was spent on a handful of smaller projects, our Plumbers have a request for some additional functionality, the Concreters gave us the 👍 for stage 2, and a few more WordPress template tweaks on the BBC/NESTA/Human Values project.