Week #765
We spent some of this week making a simple table of all our current projects, if we’re part of a team, if they are paid or internal, how long they will run and if they are winding down or not. This was partly prompted by several conversations where people talked about us and our “team”. For the VAST majority of projects, it is just 1 person doing everything. Meetings, coding (front and backend), operations, maintenance, etc. It was a good exercise into our workload.
This week we also got a small knock-back on one of the longer running projects. While the customer still wants it, they are ending some of the operational costs in the new year. That was one project where we were part of a much larger team. Our role on that project was steadily diminishing, but soon it will be bare minimum.
We continue with our WebRTC project, and realized that some of the connection issues we were chasing are probably not connection issues, but issues when a 3rd person is joining. There is probably a bug somewhere in the code when sending offers and answers, that the 3rd person joining is getting mixed-up with. That makes debugging “easier” since we can replicate all this locally rather than trying to debug TURN servers and networking issues not under our control.
On Thursday, we published a short article about PWC’s bragging about their AI efficiencies coming back to bit them: Eh, Aye! Also in this news this week was Deloitte having to repay the Australian government after the report they submitted was full of AI citation errors that were all made-up. 🤷🏻♂️
Out of frustration, we also took some time to convert a super old Swift project into SwiftUI. The app was our test-bed for camera shaders and filters. We made a new shader for the old app and it was so annoying we migrate all the logic to a new app. It’s all done and should make future experiments easier and faster.
We managed to get out of the office and meet with two different friends and colleagues this week for lunch. It was great to meet-up and hear what they’ve been up too.
Week #766
We’ve been excited for the Belkin Stage PowerGrip since it was announced in January at CES (with a shipping date of May). At the time there was no price and not much info. This battery charger/phone camera grip could be pretty useful, but we’ve been waiting and waiting for more info. This week it finally launched! It’s $80 for a 9,300 mAh battery and phone camera grip. Our next task was to look for reviews since the few real-world product pics look VERY different than the sleek renderings… and YouTube is all AI Slop. People either making-up videos based on the still images, or just making-up pictures from thin air. It doesn’t bode well for Belkin that there are no honest product reviews and what is out there makes you want to run away as fast as you can… I guess we’ll just have to wait a bit longer.
We finally got the RFP we’ve been waiting for, for a potential upcoming project and WOW it’s a strange car crash. Very, very few dates, vague goals, no timeline, no benchmarks, but lots of info we need to provide about 3rd party pricing and expenses. Ugh, things are due in less than 2 weeks with a kickoff at the end of November – for what and how long, we don’t know. Hopefully we can have a quick follow-up and get some more info so we can at least provide something.
We pushed two small VR apps to test internally this week. The first is just an internal app to collect and showcase Immersive content. If we want to sell customers on how cool the feature is, we better have some good examples. The second is a test with some equirectangular projected maps. This turned out so fun that we need to write a much longer post about this one!
We continue to work on 1 top secret project which now seems to have a deadline in about 3 weeks time. Another project we’re tangentially connected too is waiting to hear back from the ██ about their RFP. That’s on October 28th, but we’re still moving forward with the web portal overview. The WebRTC project continues to move forward. We’re planning on growing the team and shifting from development to productizing it more until the end of the year.
Most of our projects fall into a few buckets: Ongoing, completed or maintenance. Rarely do we have an ongoing project that we terminate, but this week we had too. It was a project we started back in 02016 with very little maintenance post-COVID. It was using a depreciated tech stack and other integrations that no longer exist. The owners randomly popped-up asking for everything to be fixed ASAP. We had to carefully draft a long email explaining that we can no longer support the project. We don’t have the manpower to jump at random times for something we haven’t touched in 5+ years. We agreed to update everything to 02025 specs and maintain it for the next 8 months. They need to find a new owner who will inherit everything by June 02026 or we have to turn it off. 🦗
Friday was full of meetings. We managed to first catch-up with our old friend Ian to hear what’s he’s been up too. Then our weekly PETALS sync, a meeting about the ██ portal and another about this crazy RFP.
Bric-à-brac
Never a truer sentence has been said. We put out A LOT of fires. For some projects we’re paid to be on call, other times customers don’t plan or don’t pay for support. We do our best, but we also need to fill our weeks with work to support the company and team. That means we can’t drop everything every time there’s a tiny hiccup. Hope you understand.