Week #736
The week started out on the wrong foot! We have several surveys underway and as part of that we sent a lot of email reminders. These go both to the participants to nudge them to take the survey, but also to our customers updating them of the response rate, end date, etc. We started Monday by trying to send out some reminders, but our bulk mail provider was experiencing difficulties.
On Monday, we also had several requests from our Australian customers that needed to be squeezed into the weekly schedule. Nothing major, but tasks nonetheless.
This week is also GDC (Game Developers Conference) in San Francisco. The last few years we’ve been in attendance, less so for the conference and more so for meetings. This year, we’ve got things covered from afar. Projects are already brewing and it isn’t as important for us to be there in person.
On Thursday, we published our article Eyjafjallajökull 15th Anniversary. It was back on March 20th, 02010 that the world was turned upside down from the impending ash cloud!
Week #737
On Monday we tried a new lunch time chat, hang out. There was no agenda, just a few friends going a video call and catching-up. We’ll try it again and expand the circle to a few more folks.
Tuesday, more survey stuff. We’re half way through one survey, so that means we swap around the guardians to now let the second, random guardian take part. With these most recent surveys we’re starting to hit more and more walls on performance. It feels like we haven’t change our code, but heroku is having some issues. It is hard to confirm, but in the meantime we’re going through the code and figuring out anything that is a performance hit and removing or optimizing it a bit more. We put in a support ticket and then had some database connection issues. Hopefully they can get to the bottom of all this, but I suspect their reply will be “We found nothing, it’s your problem”.
Meetings, meetings, meetings! It has been a very busy week for meetings. From afar, we’re feeding info to part of the team on the west coast as they meet with a bunch of our stakeholders as well as pitching a few potential projects. Locally, we’ve had lunch with some old colleagues who’ve made the jump to self-employment and some new arrivals to the country to chat about setting-up their own Icelandic company. Plus a new project kick-off meeting, a top secret meeting about new software features coming down the pipes so we can be ready, a few sync-up meetings and more!
We’ve also been eyeball-deep in 360 panoramic images. For the tablet and VR headset, we’re working with some architects to take their 3D renderings and put in a 360 camera to export images we can use in our apps. They look amazing and with more feedback, I’m sure we’ll do even more.
Over this weekend is when Europe jumps ahead for their “Daylight savings”. Which means a big shuffle for regularly, reoccurring meetings. Depending on who created the meeting it will either jump ahead an hour or not. We had this same jumble two weeks ago when the US jumped ahead, now Europe is catching-up and we’re stuck in the middle on perpetual UTC.
This is the last week in the quarter. We managed to stick to a weekly publishing schedule! For the first 13 weeks of the year we published either an article or a weeknote. Our goal is to keep this up in Q2. We already have a bunch of articles drafted, scheduled and ready to go!
Bric a brac
On Joseph Herscher’s YouTube channel “Joseph’s Machines”, he built a Rube Goldberg style Mario Kart race.