Week #682
This week we started yet another survey. This month it is our staff survey. Given it is a shorter month due the last week in March being Easter, we needed to be on top of starting on time and keeping-up our communications. This ensures we have a quality response rate and less work towards the end of the collection timeframe.
We also wrapped-up all our accounting tasks and closed the annual report for 02023. We sent all the info in to the tax man and we’ll wait and see. It is a never ending cycle, as we finish one year, we’re already a few months into the next.
On Tuesday, we met some folks for a morning meeting. There was no agenda, we were just recommended to meet-up since we have both been working on interesting projects. Maybe something will come out of it. Time will tell, but it is good to network and let others know we exist.
We also started tinkering on a new project with previous co-workers (insert cool code name here that we’ll need to remember in a few years when we look back at this article), which is like an old project we all worked on. In the intervening few years, the tech stack has changed, needs have changed and so have revenue models. We think that a lot of our past experience is still relevant, so we’re building on those ideas for a new project.
On Friday, we had our fortnightly PETALS sync. We went over the product and continue to spot small things here and there. We made some tickets to improve the design and layout, but also as we’ve been dog-fooding this ourselves, we realize screens which should be intended to be shown to the team, had personal data on them. This isn’t a technical bug, but something that needs to be addressed in UX. We made some tasks and will continue to iterate.
Week #683
Two potential new projects have bloomed this week. We had a meeting about one project focusing on podcasting. This is part of a grant proposal, so the work will only happen if/when it gets approved. The other project is a prototype project that we started a few weeks ago when we explored webRTC. Since that all seemed viable we came back to the client and had some more meetings and put together a pitch and timeline of “what 1 months worth of work will cost and what can we do to (in)validate this idea?”
On Wednesday we sent out our s03e03 ⪮ Good Morning Newsletter: Martian News. We continue to send out a monthly email with just four interesting topics and a bit of commentary. Most recently, it has been clumping around a single concept.
On Sunday, we are heading off to San Francisco for the Game Developers Conference. We will mostly have meetings and team planning. Everyone will be in town that week and focused on gaming, so it makes sense to line-up as much as we can in that single week to keep up going for the next 12 months. There’s a lot of exciting things in the queue, it’s just a matter of seeing who’s interested and what happens next.
Fluxcapacitor
Back in 02014, we republished a long gone article from 02007 called In Rainbows. This described an algorithm to consistently convert a string to a color. Originally used by the travel social service Dopplr, we’ve seen repurposed this on many an occasion.
In 02015, we wrote about Shelling Points. These are place solutions that people will tend to use in the absence of communication, because it seems natural, special, or relevant to them. We also speculate about whether animals have Shelling Points or if such things existing in outer space?