Week #727
On Tuesday, we published our 02024 TIL article. Every day, we browse a handful of websites and save a few “interesting” links. The intention is to look for longer story arcs and events that are more than just a single day. When we look at a yearly view rather than a daily different things come into focus.
We jumped back into an older project to help with some error tracking and basic analytics. We still have a few todos carry over to the next week.
We made another quick prototype app focusing on 360 images. During renovations around the office 5+ years ago, we took a bunch of 360 images of the work. We’ve learnt that no matter what you photograph and think is important in the moment, some contractor years later will ask about some wiring, pipes or something you didn’t think was worth taking a picture of. Luckily with a 360 camera, you set it up and it captures everything! Using these, we mocked-up a quick VR walk through of the 360 images. Much like Google Maps Indoor Street View, but using our own data structures and options. As a prototype it was great to be able to dogfood your own content while the client spends time getting theirs.
We’re always improving our survey tool and now we’re very much in the marginal gains (1% improvements) portion of things. When we offer our parent surveys to compulsory schools, we do weighted random sampling of students and then survey the guardians. The downside is that over the course of the child’s time in the school, size of the school and frequency of taking our survey, some guardians or children may never be represented in the survey. We’re how testing a new list hashing method to weight our pull method by students of guardians who’ve never taken or the longest time since taken the survey. This should guarantee that if you fit all the normal criteria every student in a large school should be represented by every third survey.
Week #728
On Monday, we booked a bunch of meetings: morning, afternoon, dinner and evening. Lots of things happened, decisions were made, but as for productive output, it was a wash. It is probably better to book everything into a single day and then get four more to focus and deal with the tasks.
We collected all the 02024 banking and credit card statements and sent those over to the accountant. It’s good to have that process underway and not being held back by us.
Next month parent surveys start for compulsory schools and kindergartens. This week we went over all the regular tasks, but we also had a few new things to update. Since this time last year, we moved from massive table-based HTML emails to something MUCH cleaner. This has two major benefits, we can use more modern methods for light/dark mode styles, but also makes editing and reviewing the HTML easier for non-technical staff. We are also testing a new weighting factor in our pull methods. This is our first year, so it is a test on just a few schools. If this works (and it looks like it does) it will be rolled-out much more widely in the following years.
Lots of small changes for another project. We’re contractors developing the software and there’s another contractor developing video content. Then for the project, there are several stakeholders. The contractor listened to the stakeholders decide which video content to approve and why so it could be released to me to add into the software. A typical Wednesday type of meeting!
We also learnt the method for making stereoscopic 360 panoramic images. We’ve been testing the output and not sure it’s much more “3D” than a non-stereoscopic version. More tests are needed.
Friday was our fortnightly PETALS sync and we’re woefully behind on what seems to be a simple task: Delete a survey. But when you look at all the interaction points, can you delete a survey an employee has already answered? What happens to that data if you can? and how do we keep it anonymous? What about any links sent via email/chat to employees that now resolve to a missing survey – should they be alerted that it was deleted (410 gone) or leave it unknown (404 missing)? Making the delete button is the easy part!
Fluxcapacitor
This week, 11 years ago, was Week #154. It is great to read back over projects we were working knowing how they progresses (or didn’t).
Þorri
Today is the first day of the old Icelandic month of Þorri. To celebrate traditions, they created Þorramatur. It is all of Icelands greatest hits: Fermented Shark, Rams Testicals, Boiled Sheep’s Face, Head Cheese, and more.
