Week #813

Monday was a public holiday in the US. That gives us a day to catch-up on internal tasks and personal projects.

We’ve been deep in C++ for the ESP32 microprocessor to control the LED lights. After constantly hitting walls, back tracking and trying another approach, we’re finally in a good spot. Every light combination we need is programmed into the system and the firmware is firing on all cylinders!

Wednesday we had both a Nintendo event. Which we are keeping closer eyes on and the bug annual Apple event. This year we got the expected barage of new iPhones and Watches. This year we got the new iPhone DUO. Time will tell how that all shakes our and how it impacts developers. For years people designed for a specific height and width and argued about “above the fold” and with every new device we get a new size ratio.

To us, there were a few items in the presentation that felt strange or awkward. A while ago we wrote about the Blind Men and the Elephant. I fully believe we say some things in their presentation which are meant not for today, but for some future hardware.

On Thursday, we published a bit more about our backup scheme, specifically how we’re handling some backups of database backups. We identified a potential issue and plugged the hole to prevent accidents.

With the publication of the iOS/macOS/Xcode 27 Release Candidates, we updated everything and got a chance to experiment with some Gaussian Splats. These are now first-class file types and we have libraries to natively load and view the output.

There is the concept of Quiet or Ghost Quitting, where someone no longer responds or shows-up. We’re a bit on the opposite end and have a Ghost Firing. We’re on a project, but can’t get any meetings booked and the weekly sync has been cancelled. We’re here and ready, but the customer seems to have second thoughts, but doesn’t want to pull the plug (yet). We’ll see what the next weeks hold.

Week #814

This week we started off with a remote visit for the LED project. We uploaded our new software to the microcontroller and it worked flawlessly! Of course the model makers had changed the LED count, so we had to change the software. Somewhere along the way the ESP32 died. We had a backup and flashed that one and did a quick test and it worked, but now we need to unsolder a bunch of connects on the old board to the new one and split the LED strip into two universes. On Thursday, we went back and confirmed all the updates with the architect. 🍾

We continue with updates to an old survey. We’re trying our best to extract ourselves from this project. We’re no longer dealing with any other projects around health data and our school surveys are getting more focused. We told the customer this a few years ago, but the transition is a slow one. We are JUST ABOUT at the finish line. We’ve updated the code libraries and login method, now we’re making the last of the question and text tweaks. Then we really want to hand this over to their new tech team.

On Tuesday, we had a meeting for another project. We met with the architects and design teams to go over the software, workflow and other image rendering requirements. Off the back of that we had to make a few tweaks to our software to fix some bugs and new ideas that came up in the meeting.

We also managed to have an online meeting with an old friend in Lisbon to hear what he’s up to.

Overall, these last two weeks we touched eight or nine different projects over ten (realistically nine) work days.