02021 Omnibus

Saturday, January 1st, 02022 at 00:00 UTC

02009 was our first Omnibus article. At the time, it was a way to look back at all the previous articles and make corrections, highlight additions and updates. This is the 11th of our Omnibus articles and things have morphed with time to focus on articles, communications, stats and the website.

Past Omnibuses:

This list is getting too long, so we now have a new Omnibus category. That makes it easier to find all these related articles on a single page.

Articles

We published 35 articles this year. 27 of which were weeknotes and 8 non-weeknotes. That works out to be an article every 1.625 weeks. All of these articles total 34,758 words or around 990 words each. Of the 8 we did manage to write, 3 were internal about the company, 2 were about the Material conference and 3 about projects.

  1. Material Delays
  2. Golden Ratio Rulers
  3. The king is dead long live the king
  4. Robocalling
  5. Sowing Material’s Future
  6. 02020 Annual Report
  7. First Word Instance
  8. 02020 Omnibus

There are 120+ drafts in various stages of done and we hope to increase our writing output in the next year. 02021 was a slow year for articles, but COVID had a big impact on our ability to plan. Writing takes time, planning, and space, but the year seems to have been very reactionary to projects and clients. Sadly, writing seems to be the first thing to get cut.

Projects

This year focused about 4 categories: external projects, mostly in Australia, survey projects, internal projects and top secret projects.

The Australia projects revolved mostly around helping companies streamline their payroll and project financial management. They all use the xero accounting system. Our tool is a web-based interface to help employees log their time or for companies to assign work locations to staff. This all feeds back into payroll to save them time and reduce errors.

The survey projects continue to tick along as we continue to make incremental improvements to the system. We wrote about our robocalling tool which has been very powerful in helping achieve a reliable response rate.

Our top secret projects are just that, so we can’t discuss them too much. One (should) launch early next year, the other has been waiting for contracts to be signed by 4 different parties for several months and it seems that’s now all wrapped up. This project is part of something much bigger so we can’t really talk about it until one of those four signatures decides to announce it. Our role will be two-fold, data analytics and economy balancing: from simulations to tools to help manage it all.

Finally, internal projects! We’ve mostly been doing small things internally. Little scripts to calculate new words published on this site, finally got some things laser cut, and have been working closely with some farmers who own a small slaughter house. Sheepskins are one of their byproducts and we’ve been helping their team with some of the technical aspects of inventory management, websites and sales. We’ve also been using those connections to work on a few other Icelandic sheep wool related projects, but those aren’t quite ready to talk about yet.

Travel

None. At the start of 02021, we expected to not do any traveling for 3-6 months. We didn’t do any the whole year. Some internal trips in Iceland to keep our sanity, but no flights.

We expect that to continue in 02022, both due to new COVID variants, but also because the number of flights have been drastically reduced. It makes the logistics more difficult and sometimes, just not worth it! There are a few potential things for next year, but we’ll just have to wait and see.

We’d also love to get back to Brighton, England for dConstruct in 02022, assuming it isn’t postponed another year.

What’s Next in 02022

We are reconfiguring our newsletters. We’ve brought the sign-up and sending process in house. We are also splitting our quarterly newsletter into two distinct newsletters: the quarterly newsletter which will be mostly internal news and a new monthly newsletter focused on interesting stuff.

We have 122 articles in the draft folder (including this one). This and another are the usual end-of-year articles, then we have another 7 on the shortlist. It would be great to get those published in 02022, but we adjust to the times and sometimes write about what is right in front of us. Those articles in draft folder will continue to wait.

We have also been, slowly, updating the site design. Better dark mode support, tweaks to the mobile pages, etc. We do our best to not skip anything, but there are a few pages that still need work and we’ll do that in 02022.