Week #749
On Tuesday, Iceland celebrated National Day and Thursday was Juneteenth in the US. They were both public holidays chopping the week into three, one-day pieces. Projects were very stop and start, but we did make some progress. The WebRTC project hit another small milestone getting two apps to connect and conduct a video call. Now we’ve managed to get web-to-web, web-to-app, and app-to-app all communicating. Still lots of loose ends around multiple video participants, but progress is in the right direction.
Throughout the week, we’ve also been working on a project for the Australian concreters. We’ve had some minor web app improvements. Mostly quality of life stuff: better caching, color-coding table based on job type and improving permissions. We are also developing the web app further to handle another division in the company and its inventory management. It’s not a huge project, but not small either. We’re now at the point where a few decisions need to be made and we’ll have a late Sunday meeting to sync for the next week.
The procrastination on other tasks lead us to a productive Wednesday. Rather than do the tasks at hand, we took a break and went back to the survey projects. We have a list of summer tasks we want to look into, some small others large. We knocked out a few smaller ones; 2FA reset requests and a ‘welcome back info box’ to confirm all the customer details at the start of the academic year. Next week the plan is to push the branches we’ve been working on to massively upgrade the software stack and dependencies. This will make maintenance and development easier, but also patch security issues and hopefully improve performance.
On Thursday, we met-up with a friend who’s also doing some VR work and other physical installation work and had a great long chat and catch-up. Even a few potential plans have emerged. Our main goal was to onboard him on an old VR project we built. Luckily it worked and went very smoothly!
On Friday, we published an article Blind Men and the Elephant. We keep a close eye on technology and we’re always looking at new ways or lead indicators of where things are heading. Apple, Google, Meta, Samsung all have big product announcements. If you take all the pieces holistically and assume they are only a tiny part of something bigger, you begin to see companies developing the future in front of you without you even realizing it.
Week #750
We started the week off with our Australian concreters. The new inventory management system is taking shape. We have all the projects in the database with their inventory, projected usage, restock dates to help maintain some JIT (Just-in-time) delivery. The next big task is to get this data entered and map for actual job instances.
For our survey system, we’ve been upgrading all the libraries and generally brining everything up to the latest stable versions. In the process we’re dumping old code, reviewing login flows and fixing a few old bugs in the process. Once we merge the branch back into main, we’ll start the next task to update the themes to accommodate better readability fonts and colors, dark mode, and more modern CSS.
Thursday we spent out of the office down at the local co-working space. There was a lunchtime presentation by an AI company and most people left. We also managed to get a bunch of writing done and planning the publishing schedule for Q3.
For the next two weeks, we’re closing the office (mostly). Next week, the Q3 newsletter is queued-up and we’ll have another double weeknote highlighting our time off (we hope).
Bric-à-brac
We went down the rabbit hole of old Light Guns and how CRT monitors had incredible refresh rates compared to modern LCDs. In the Nintendo museum in Kyoto, there is a Zapper and Scope exhibition and it is interesting learn how they managed to bring this 40 year old tech up to modern day.
The slow-mo guys explain how the Zapper gun works. The gun is the receiver and the TV produces all black frames and frames where a white box represents a hit. The receiver then registers what it saw and that in turn was a hit or a miss.