We had another Open Office Hour meeting on Monday night. We caught-up with an old college friend, it was short because he had to dash, but we’ll fine a time that works across our time zones.
Apple’s WWDC started this week. We’ve been watching closely what new technologies will be available both for the iPhone, Watch, TV, Mac and hints at upcoming hardware. The sessions have ranged from Accessibility, to moving away from passwords, to Vision technology and more. You don’t need to be an app developer to get value from many of the sessions.
Human Values
Last week, we pretty much wrapped-up the WordPress development for the BBC/NESTA/Human Values project. Now that things are pretty well settled down, it was time to take a proper backup. There were lots of changes locally, some hot-fixes on the server, uploaded supplemental images, etc. It was time to collect all these and have them nicely archived, just in case.
There is still more todo on the project, but these will be ad hoc little bits of new functionality that have nothing todo with the design, layout or CMS.
Australian Concreters
This project is wrapping-up as well. We have completed all the originally spec’ed out tasks, the last this week were to connect the website to upload images directly to S3. This was done in javascript to bypass the need to upload anything to the server first. It worked, but then the client wanted to be able to upload multiple images at the same time, so we tweaked the code todo that too.
Most of the system relies on their accounting software xero as the ‘source of truth’ when it comes to employees, jobs, etc. We use that to set employee permissions and register time to job locations. The xero API is very robust, so rather than elevate some employee permissions in xero, we were able to let them do some basic management of jobs via our tool rather than in xero.
Since we started on this project, the concreters have been acquired by another firm. Our tool was part of the reason. The new owners will incorporate our tool in their daily running of the business. So a few of this weeks tweaks were requests that solve problems of the new owners. While we close-out this project, in a few months, we’ll re-open it; change the company logo, colors and update the API keys to the new xero account.
Team Pfiser 💉
On Tuesday, the rest if the office received their first dose of the Pfiser vaccine. We’ll go back in 3 week, then 2 weeks more it will be fully effective. The whole experience was the most, un-Icelandic thing: People were properly queueing, listened to instruction and it was a well oiled machine. We all filled in, sat down in rows and the nurses proceed to give everyone shots. 12 minutes later we could file out row by row.
The rest of the week, we slept-off the side-effects of the vaccine.
Next Week
Hopefully, next week, we’ll get back on the long list of internal projects. It is only a few weeks until summer vacations kick-in. Getting anything done in July/August in Iceland is a massive uphill battle, so best to not even try. Wrap-up client projects, take time off and look internally for some tasks.
For one project, we’ve complied a list of available LEGO block by color that we can purchase. Then we’ll plug that into some code and see if we get a nice shopping list out the other side.