Week #787
This week we posted about our trip to SXSW Interactive in 02006 (twenty years ago!). We mentioned meeting some of the folks behind 43things. This week we actually found our old list from their website on archive.org.
Of the seven things we had on our list, we did move to another country, we debatably learned a new language and we certainly wrote a book. There’s still time to be interviewed on TV as a guest.
This week was the GDC conference in San Francisco. We did not attend this year, but some of our partners were there having lots of meetings. In the next few weeks we’ll see how that impacts our current and potential projects.
Since we’ve been deep in Xcode and Swift programming, we continued to updated a few apps to SwiftUI. In the process also fixing some crash errors people have been experiencing. Xcode does give you crash reports with some stack trace of what happened. We fixed a bunch of deep errors on the Mindfulness Shipping Forecast app while we updated that to a modern code-base. In the process we improved the voice, added some tips, dark mode and fixed a bunch of bugs.
The other app that still had not been updated was Newsletters. Much like Triagemail was, Newsletters used Mailcore to handle the IMAP messages. This week, we switched over to SwiftMail to both modernize the app and make it easier to maintain and port. The progress has been going well and we continue to find and fix bugs in the differences between the two libraries.
Throughout the week, we had several small tasks regarding all our surveys. For the parent surveys, we randomly select one of the two guardians to take the survey. Half-way through the month, we switch guardians. This gives the first a chance to answer and if after several reminders they still do not want to participate, we swap for the other guardian and let them have a chance to contribute. We did the swap on Monday and started the reminder schedule of email, sms, email. Next week we’ll email, robocall, email again. Depending on the response rate for customers, we might try a targeted SMS or email in English. For other on-going surveys we also sent out emails and robocalled this week. All of these surveys will end before the Easter break, so we’re trying to leave ourselves the last week of March for adjustments to reminders before people checkout for the holidays.
Week #788
On Monday, we sent out more survey reminder emails. We use Heroku as the hosting platform and we have background tasks to send all the messages. Thanks go GMail’s aggressive bulk/spam detection we need to put a second delay between sendings. It’s only been recently that our heroku background task has been producing enough memory leak errors that the process gets shutdown. We haven’t changed anything for years, so it is most likely heroku getting stricter. These last few weeks we’ve been trying a few different changes and memory profiling to mitigate the leaks.
We continue to tweak a few of the iOS camera apps. The Newsletter app is in good shape, we’re continuing the test and fix anything before we release it.
Our Australian concreters also sent over a list of changes. It’s great that they are using the system and have feedback, but their emails can be short and confusing. We’ll do what we can and then get clarification on a few other points. Luckily, this is all billable time. A few weeks ago, we thought the project was done, so we sent off the last invoice and they renegotiated the hourly rate due to general inflation. These updates are now under the new rate. On Wednesday, we got a message from our contact that he’s interested in extricating himself as the middleman. It means we take-over the project directly at a higher hourly rate. We’ll most likely do it, but the timezone difference and the small hours could potentially be a hassle.
Bric-à-brac
We found this great little puzzle game: Murdoku – Sudoku meets murder mystery
