Week #815
This week we continued work on a few older projects.
The old health survey we’re trying to extract ourselves from continues to keep adding little things. We do them and charge an hourly rate, but next week they will be taking it back out in public, probably the first time since COVID 6+ years ago. That feels like things are “done” enough that we can pass this project off to their other development team. On Friday, we meet-up with the client and went over a bunch of small tasks as we start the transition.
Overall, the project is fine, but times have changed and we are not dealing with sensitive health data on any other projects. This is becoming a bigger liability than we’re willing to periodically take on. Giving this to another team that works closer with the organization is best for everyone.
The camera project we were only supposed to swap the API for last Christmas is also in a good spot. We debugged a few issues this week with the GPS tracking. Otherwise things are pretty quiet and they will meet some potential investors next week. If they manage to get some funding, they will hire a team and we’ll pass-off this project to them as well.
Another project from last Christmas is also coming back. This one’s been on some pretty big ups and downs (shame we can’t talk about it yet). But we worked with them again this week to create yet another quick demo app skinned to look like the company we’re pitching to. As of Thursday night, it seems like plans are changing for the good and now we need to consider pitching this to atleast two companies now!
On the school survey front, October is a big month. We have the most schools taking part in the 6-10th grade surveys and we also conduct a one-off 1-5th grade survey. Before those start, we’re adding Arabic to both of those surveys. It isn’t a huge process, we have a nice way to export all the translations keys and we send that off to translation with either an English or Icelandic base. We get back the Arabic which we put back into the system. Then we generate mp4 files for each of these strings so we have a cached text-to-speech option for anyone who has trouble reading.
There is a potential VR/AR project waiting for us in the wings. Another part of the team has been working on a web-based Unity app for a customer and it’s coming time to eventually port this to VR/AR. (Again, another project we’d love to talk about, but can’t yet)
In the time between projects, we continue to tick off a few issues on our iPad/Mac/LED project. Overall, we’re in a great shape and ahead of other parties working on this project.
Week #816
We continue to wrap-up the Health Survey as we finish off the last tweaks before we hand it over. The goal is to make that transition before the end of the month, but that’s dependent on the incoming team and the lawyers reviewing all the compliance documentation.
On Tuesday, we collected our A1 poster prints. We use a local company called pixel.is to do the printing on their A1 architectural printer. It costs around $3 per sheet. This year we printed a bunch of 02027 calendars, which you can download the PDF and print yourself along with two test art posters and a map poster which we intend to annotate.
On the ‘keep things running’ front, we have a few lambda function on AWS that we babysit. Annoyingly, they are getting old and AWS complains we need to change our Python runtime. Todo this, we need to upgrade some libraries, which are no longer supported. We bit the bullet, and made the changes, replaced the old libraries and got it working. Hopefully it will be a few more years now before we need to touch it again.
It is also the end of the month, so it’s time to get all the bills sorted and logged for the accountants. A stitch in time saved nine. While all the bookkeeping is annoying, small monthly doses make the end of the year much easier to swallow!
We have a game prototype that’s built and pretty far along. It’s waiting to be shopped around to a few organizations and get some blessings on the intellectual property we’ve used. While we wait, we’re double-dipping and duplicating all the code to make a similar, but differently themed version. That’s been ongoing, but this week we really turned the corner. There is a working HTML wireframe that is powered by the content database. This allows us to do two things at once; improve the content and find out which screens and states are missing.