Week #696
On Monday, Apple’s Word Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) kicked off. We have several projects going on in the Apple ecosystem, so we’ve been keeping a close eye on some of the new software that’s coming out this year for various platforms.
We made several big steps in our office clean-up/shuffle. A while ago, we swapped office rooms which meant everything just got put into boxes, moved and forgotten about. This was also prompted by a bit of a hardware re-organization and upgrade. In the process and older 02018 Intel Mac mini freed-up and that’s now in the process of becoming the central file server. Which all ties back to improved back-ups and networking around the office.
The main focus for this week, and probably the summer, will be this Miami project. It is a mix of iOS and web admin/api. Things are now pretty focused and they got customer feedback. Now we’re just running forward on code, UI and prepping for some customer beta testing.
Week #697
On Monday, it was the 17th of June. In Iceland, that’s Independence Day. The office was mostly closed, but we had to deal with a few US meetings. Luckily, on Wednesday the 19th of June was Juneteenth, a public holiday in the US, so that was a bit of a lighter day since most people weren’t at work.
For another customer, we spent some time to create a summer todo list. That way, if anyone was out of tasks and people were away on holiday, there was always something to take from the pile that needed doing. One summer tasks was to refactor the HTML emails sent. We originally found a nice template and copied that. It was nested <table>s in <table>s. Which worked, but was really hard to edit. Over the years the design got simpler and simpler. Now there is no reason to keep it all table based. So we’re refactoring it all for modern devices and mobile mail clients. In the process it should be easier to update, maintain and we can add more features like ‘dark mode’ support, fancier gmail actions all while reducing our potential spam score.
This week, we sent out our ⪮ Good Morning Season 3 Episode 6 newsletter. This month’s theme was all about Bread and some strange interconnections.
On Wednesday we had a kickoff meeting for a project down in Australia. This is with a company who needs a better overview of their inventory and finances. We’re tasked with joining-up their inventory system, their accounting system and dashboards. Many of these services have an API, some don’t but do have CSV exports (which sort of counts as a bad API). For simplicity, this is going to be built using Google Colab (iPython Notebooks) to glue together the various services.
On Thursday, we were testing, deploying and fixing bugs while on the way to a demo! Everything went great, once it was in the hands of the customer, we found more bugs and issues, but that was exactly the point. We’ll iterate the rest of the week and regroup next week to readjust focus.
Friday was our bi-weekly PETALS meet-up. Our last meeting was with a few users of the system and they offered a bunch of great feedback. We’ve captured most of it as GitHub issues and fixed a few. Today’s meet-up was mostly to go over tasks, set some expectations and prepare for the summer slump.
One of the many small side-projects we’ve been working on has been smoldering behind the scenes. We’ve got 2-3 ideas and directions we could take this idea and we’ve got feelers out and pitching it in various forms. This week a new idea arose. We’re always wondered if this idea is the goal, or the tool to get your closer to your goal? Now, we’ve found a good flow to use this idea as the meta-goal, yet have it still make sense in the context of the bigger picture!