Week #672
It was the week between Christmas 🎄 and New Year 🎊. The office was closed and we enjoyed the time-off and chance to recharge the batteries 🔋 a bit.
Week #673
We managed to publish the Omnibus 02023. On Deck are: 02023 Annual Report, 02023 TIL, Newsletter ◍ Quarternotes 02024Q1 and ⪮ Good Morning s03e01.
Metaphorically, we started-up the engines again. The gears are turning and we’re starting to get some projects back in motion. Unfortunately, all the sickness that got us last month caught-up to some of our customers. Things are off to a slower start than expected, but we’ve turned to a few internal projects.
We updated two of our iOS apps: Triagemail and Newsletters. Both are now SwiftUI apps and should make it much easier to update in the future and keep-up with newest hardware changes.
With all the coding success and on-demand printing with our Adventure Mazes, we started on another internal project. Reusing all the PHP code to create SVG pages and converting them into a PDF, we’re working on another puzzle book suitable for print-on-demand.
It is the start of the year and we are also reviewing our back-up strategies. Looking at the 3-2-1 method: 3 copies, (1 original and 2 backups) 2 mediums, (incase something gets corrupted or fails at the same rate have atleast two different types/manufactures of the hardware) and 1 offsite (incase of a fire or accident). With our Time Machine backups, we are pretty good at the 3 part. The 2 part isn’t horrible since we have SSDs and a hodgepodge of different external spinning disk hard drives. The 1 part is where we are failing. Putting 10TB to an online service comes with reoccurring costs, so we are looking at other solutions. One of which is periodically backing-up to either an external HD and giving that to a family member or setting-up a remote HD we can SSH/VPN into and backup as if it were a disk on our desktop. We looked into a NAS, but with one HD already a NAS connected to the router as the Time Machine backups, we’re only in need of a file-server for cold-storage, old conference videos, photos, music, previous company files, etc. Not a real working, day-to-day, fast NAS. This backup/storage project is in its infancy, it is good to know where our shortcomings are and we’ll see how it grows in 02024.
We started stubbing out a new client project and our go to boiler plate is: Heroku, Django/Python, Twilio, S3 and SQS. We can get most of that all setup with a basic “hello world” page behind a login pretty quickly. From that point, we can have further discussions about what functionality needs to be where. Luckily, the web portion (to start with) is mostly a CRM and administration tool to collect and manage form submissions. While setting all this up, we took the opportunity to upgrade all the packages and python version runtime.
We also managed to have a quick PETALS sync this week. Not much development progress, but plenty of small things sorted out. Plus, we got some shinny, branded stickers!