Week #668
Overall, this week was difficult as several of the team continue to be sick and/or under the weather. It made planning hard and the workload difficult to keep-up with. At best, we managed stay on top of emails and meetings, but not much else moved forward.
One project we keenly watched was Naro.tv. It was a paid masterclass video service with Japanese masters. From Sumo to Anime and everything in between, their paid courses were well done. Sadly, they had to shut down due to economic reasons.
We were alerted to an issue with our SMS sending for a project down in Australia. After looking, we found the bug! In the exception handling we were calling a logging library that wasn’t included. This caused the script to crash rather than being handled gracefully. We fixed that, then turned to why the exception was occurring in the first place. It turns out, that some of the employees they are trying to SMS information too, do not have a phone number in our database. We added more debugging to let the customer know what the errors were so they can clean-up their employee database so this isn’t a problem in the future.
It was the end of the month this week, so we had to send invoices and pay all the bills. This year we switched to managing more and more of our accounting and it has been going smoothly as long as we stay on top of the reconciliation each month.
Our fortnightly PETALs sync went well. We continue to identify small things we need to work on like a proper lexicon. When are things called a ‘health check’ versus ‘PETALS’ versus ‘snapshot’? We also discussed the flow through the web app and decided to focus this sprint on main/detail pages. Displaying less info at the start and requiring team leads to click more to get to the details. We’ll try this, get feedback and iterate as needed.
Week #669
Sickness continued this week so productivity was low. We managed to have a meeting, not about a potential new project, but instead we’re being used in the due diligence process to vet a potential investment. Friends-of-friends are looking to invest in a start-up and want to know if we were/are as impressed by the tech as they were. After the meeting, we reviewed their demo and got access to the SDK in an attempt to built a really simple “hello world” demo of our own.
Lots of little tasks. We fixed a WordPress template from a few years ago to update the HTML footer. Looked into some of our push notification script triggers and posted on various social media channels about our 02024 Annual Wall Calendar.
On Thursday and Friday we attended some workshops as part of a grant we received for the eBike project. These were the last of this program, just one more final mentor meeting in January. Overall, the experience has been tepid. Everyone in the program is at different stages of their company as well as life experience and trying to provide lectures that fit all those categories simultaneously is difficult.
Fluxcapacitor
Back in 02019, we wrote about Emoji Explosion. Around that time, it seemed that emojis had tipped to everyday use, but emojis had been around and in use for much longer than we expected.
In 02009, we publish Welcome, the entire land. This was after attending dConstruct and having one of those random conversations that snowballed into something much bigger and seemingly pointless.
Bric-à-brac
Pantone have announced their color of the year for 02024. It is PANTONE 13-1023 Peach Fuzz.
Not that it means a whole lot what they choose the color of the year to be, but it is worth remembering that sometimes life imitates art and art imitates life. Simply by picking this color, they might/will be making it more popular and you’ll see it in more places. It can be self-fullfilling, but at the same time, they have been watching trends and are not wildly choosing something at random.