Week #731
On Tuesday, we published our 02024 Annual Report article. It offers a high-level of what we spent our time and money on and what sorts of returns we get on various projects and articles.
This week we managed to have a very over-due meet-up with some friends. We talked Maps, Geo, VR/AR and more. It has sparked a lot of other ideas and a few mini-projects!
Our off-side NAS is up and running and we’ve managed to sync all of our file server data. We now have two copies locally and a 3rd remote! All of the computers are backed-up locally via TimeMachine, but we’re now in the process of getting those sparsebundle files offsite. There are other options, which we need to explore, but for now we’ll have some piece of mind that there is a remote copy. There is always room for improvements, but we’re now in the best possible position to improve.
The Australian projects seem to have woken-up! The plumbers finally managed to make the jump to their new Xero account. It is a new company. For their accounting they needed to move everything over. After a few hiccups we’re almost through. When we built the web-app for them, we used the hard-coded ids from Xero for various factors like normal pay, overtime, double time, etc. We managed to correctly migrate all, but a few snuck through and caused a few problems. Overall, it seems to be running smoothly. Then the concreters had some updates. They are still iterating on the product and we’d take a few hours here and there to add the features they need. The most recent has been visually flagging who’s filled-out the credit audit paperwork and tracking which jobs have deposits or not. Based on these they can better shuffle their workforce to better customers. Then there is a new project around helping a scaffolding company manage their inventory and estimated overages. We’re in the process of pitching this project, but it could be a big one.
The parent surveys continue to run. We’ve emailed, SMSed, emailed, Robocalled and emailed the first guardian and on Thursday we took all those who have not answered and swapped guardians and now allow the second guardian a chance to answer. That means a bunch of database back-ups, some swaps and double-checking everything before we sent out an email and SMS. Overall, the response rates are above 50% with more than half a month to go, we’re pretty confident we’ll hit the 80% mark.
We also started on another survey which should start in February. This is education related, but we’re just handling the data collection. Then in March we’ll be running our staff surveys, which we’ve already started to collect information about.
Finally, on the survey front, we’ve decided to stop offering our general staff survey. There is a lot of competition in the market and seemingly customers jump around. Instead, we’re going to refocus on our staff surveys in schools where there is less competition and we’re better position in the market.
Week #732
We started the week off with more survey reminders. An email on Monday letting people know about Wednesday’s Robocall. Then we’ll send a final reminder before we turn off the list of unstated participants to our customers. We need the response rate to be 80% or higher for the most reliability. They’re on a great track, but we’re at the point of diminishing returns. With each ‘touch point’ the percentage complete plateaus more and more. This is to be expected and part of why we are constantly reminding people every few days to get reliable results.
One print project got rejected by the final local big publishing company. The ball’s back in our court now, so we’re drafting-up a complete copy to get a quote at a few local printers. One company we showed this too couldn’t do the publishing, but were more than happy to sell it in their shop. If we can get an “inexpensive” print-run at a moderate quantity, we’re considering moving forward.
We’ve also re-kindled a project that’s been sitting on the back burner for a long time. We originally prototyped something in SwiftUI, then another part of the team built it out in Unity. Things stalled and we’ve started flushing out more from the original prototype back in SwiftUI. The big missing component is a good UI/UX pass. If we had a general art direction/style we could make the app look more than just 1-color wireframes.
Bric-à-brac
This week we learnt: by 02026, the EU (and probably in turn the US) will no longer offer 5-star safety ratings for vehicles who have primary driving functions not controlled by physical buttons, stalks or dials. This means the era of primary touch screen devices is out if you want to be safe.