Right at the tail-end of last week, Iceland experienced a partial solar eclipse.
On the 12th of August 2026 at 16:42, Iceland will experience a total solar eclipse. Things will go dark, assuming the weather is clear!
For our surveys, we have on stage of reminders being a robocall. We have an automated decision tree make a call-out and playback an mp3 file and allow participants to re-request their login code. Depending on the audience we try to find a sensible time to do the calling. If it is a staff survey, we can do it during business hours, but if it isn’t we want to avoid the normal 9-5, but also not be too late. Recently, we’ve been trying to call in the afternoons on the weekend to see how that affects the response rate.
On Tuesday, we sent out our Quarternotes Q2 newsletter. If you’re not subscribed, we offer inbox delivery, RSS and an online version.
Q1 is over. There isn’t much administrative tasks when this happens, like the end of a fiscal year or when our VAT is due. But it is a good point to look back and reflect on what’s been happening. More and more, we’re wrestling with the fact that we’re super busy, but can’t really talk about any of the projects in detail (yet). Stretching out weeknotes and emails with vagueries about what we’ve been doing is getting a bit boring. 🫠
On Tuesday we also started the last of our surveys. In the background we have one running each month, but that runs like clockwork. These single month surveys tend to be bigger and more involved. We have many “touch points” with the participants: emails, sms, calls, etc. We’re in the final stretch of survey season for the school year.
On Wednesday, we had a kickoff meeting for another prototyping project. This one is around WebRTC and should last 3-4 months. We managed to spin-up our boilerplate Django app with authentication and some basic API work. Then a prototype iOS and tvOS app which has a login and connects to that API. That’s all working, now we can actually start to style it and get into the specific business logic.
We also meet-up with some friends to discuss more calendar workflow stuff. We’re all noodling on some new calendar UI/UX and it will be interesting to see where it goes.
On Thursday, we finally got the GDC debrief and loads of good news! A few of our goals can be ticked off and the ball is rolling to see where some of these ideas can go! (more on that later).
Friday was full of meetings. We had a PETALS sync to try and get the last items out the door to launch the new UI. Just needed to go over a few Pull Requests and get the testing working again locally. We also had a demo of another prototype game we’re involved with. This one is in Unity so we’re not directly contributing any code or design (yet).
This whole week, we’ve seen new tariffs, which don’t affect us directly in our products, and a dropping exchange rate. We’ve lost 8-10% of the value of our international invoices! Hopefully things will bounce back, or atleast level off. If things get worse, we need to re-evaluate a few projects on the horizon.