Week #799
This week we got the green light on a project we’ve been hovering around for a while. We went down to Miami a few weeks ago to demo the prototype, but this week they finally decided to sign the contract with us to productize the software. We’re on the hook now for two years of support and production, but in reality we have a short deadline and then the long-tail of bug fixes, optimizations and more.
As part of this project, we’ve move all the code for the app and website into GitHub. From there we’ve hooked-up auto-building Xcode cloud and Heroku deploys. Now we can use the Issue tracker, from which we can create PRs, merge the fixes and deploy automatically. This means any small text change can be done via the GitHub web interface and be live in minutes.
We continue to support a new game idea with a few meetings a week. Usually a Monday kickoff planning with the Engineering team and/or maybe the whole team. Then a Friday show-and-tell. On Friday, we also met with the stakeholders to figure out both the IP licensing and potential markets for the game. For these game projects, we’re trying to run an A-team and B-team. (We need new names) The idea wasn’t A-quality and B-quality, it was more large scope and small scope. Running a B-project allowed for junior developers/designers to cut their team on professional projects with a smaller, more manageable scope. This project is a shorter B-project between A-projects, which we need to be careful doesn’t grow too much in scope into an A-project!
On Thursday, we also published an article about our TIL DB (Today I Learnt DataBase).
We also added the “Fluxcapacitor” section to the footer. This look at past published articles and tries to resurface other articles written around the current time in the past.
Two other projects we have in the background we’re reaching a logical conclusion. For the older project, we’ve fixed all the bugs, completed all the tasks and now it’s moving over to the friends and family tester phase. We’ll get some feedback from that and move over to UI/UX clean-up, any missing functionality or changes, and see what the next steps will be. Maybe they will go raise some money and build-up a team of their own.
The newer project, which we were only suppose to come-in and swap and API, ended-up sucking us in for month with a whole new iOS app(s) connected to a completely new backend. We are pretty much done, now the backend needs to be stable and work for them to pitch this to investors and build-up their own team.
See a pattern here? We like to come in, build-up the prototype and help them raise money and build a team. We’ve done this successfully 2-3 other times now with these two additional ones in the pipeline.
About a year ago, we were approached about a project, but the investors turned it down. After mulling on it for a year, we wanted to revisit it. The time to prototype and level of risk are much less. Turns out they went and built it anyway without us and it flopped.
Maybe we dodged a headache, maybe we could have done better, maybe we should listen to the investors. Tech feels like 99% of the way to solve the problem, but sometimes it’s less than 50%.
Week #800
It is our 800th week since the company was founded… or was it? On such an occasion we went to look back and our history. The original Optional SLF company had a kennitala of 470211-1130 which is DD-MM-YYYY and a checksum. But since people use 1-31, companies always started with a 4, 5 or 6 (you subtract 3 to get the real date). We’ve been celebrating and counting since the 7th of February 02011. That gets us to week #800 this week. But we then went to Fyrirtækiskrá and looked-up the original company and we sent in the paperwork on the 14th of December 02010. It took nearly 2 months to process! (We probably were missing some paperwork or forgot to sign something)
The current incarnation of the company (switching from full-liability too a limited liability company) had to restart our company id and that was registered on the 4th of May 2021.
If we conduct our own “Julian to Gregorian” calendar adjustment this is actually week #806!
Over the weekend, between Week #799 & #800, was the Icelandic holiday Sjómannadagurinn (Fisherman’s day). We took full advantage of the good weather and went down to the harbor.
This week was designed to get into a meeting groove as summer approaches. We met about our game project idea a few times this week.
We also now have weekly meetings about the larger software project. Partly to get feedback from the team and users, but also to make sure we’re on course to hit the deadlines. (Strangely after last week’s kickoff meeting, they haven’t found a time when everyone can meet.)
Then we had a meeting about the Icelandic SSO tool that was deprecated a few years ago. We’ve been working with another company who is implementing the replacement. Something we’ve been told will just take a few hours of work, somehow has been put off for years! We are keen to close this project, but want to hand it off in a working state.
This week felt like shouting into the abyss. We sent a bunch of emails, messages and meeting requests only to be ignored. Sure, people are busy, but at the same time they asked us to do some work and it’s hard when we don’t get a response.