Weeknote 215-217
Before this turns into month notes i guess i should rip out a quick bit of prose. These past few weeks have been dedicated to bringing in new projects after finishing some big’uns. Luckily thats been turning out well. Starting next week were mostly busy again for the coming months. With perhaps some exceptions for small projects and front-end work, for which we still have some capacity.
Next week will be the third for our new intern Laurens. He’s studying computer science at the Haagse Hogeschool and turned out to be quite the spirited young fellow. We’ve put him to work on some tools for our fresh.li service but i wouldn’t be surprised to find him working on other projects too in a few more weeks. Like me he has a special fondness for side projects and might be one of the few interns i know who actually hired an intern himself to help him manage the weekly (!) dance events he organizes in The Hague (among other things apparently). Either way, the other co-workers seem to like him so he’ll do fine.
I’ve created a badge-monster by introducing Suzanne to Foursquare. Culminating in a mad rush to get the Warhol badge during past fridays Hoogtij rondgang. A pretty neat event at which you can tour a whole bunch of The Hague galleries during a single evening. For which, incidentally, Sylvia (our Automatique web designer) created the map that helped people find their way, and a temporary website while we wait for their current webmaster to return from foreign lands.
My intention to do more interaction design seems to have been magically picked up by clients with some work coming in to do both experience design for an upcoming live event and the wireframes for a new web project. Neither of which i can say anything about yet. Maybe i should come up with cool code names for them… i think i’ll go for project Harrow and project Cauldron.
I can already lift the veil on next weeks weeknote a bit since coming friday we’ll be hosting another awesome /dev/haag meetup. The organizing took a lot less effort this time round with presenters quickly found and people signing up without much prodding at all. The line-up is once again looking great with Peter-Paul Koch of Quirksmode fame taking on the ‘keynote’ dubbed “The Future of the Mobile Web” followed by Marise Schot on designing for Happiness, Beer van Geer on brain-machine interfaces and Niek Kramer on the generated architecture flowing from his 3D printer. I personally think you’ll have fun when you come. And if you’d like to present too, get in touch, i think we can manage one or two more presentations.
Although I was meaning to write a similar post myself I just found this post by the Quplo team who went on a very similar journey to find the best payment service as I did. We did not come to same conclusions so I might still write mine but this post, and the ones before it on the same subject, make for very interesting reading material if your on the verge of launching a startup in NL yourself.
Weeknote 214
I was a bit afraid i had to write another “almost there..” this weeknote but not so! This past week Liz & Vic launched into private beta during the Amsterdam International Fashion week. The second batch of invites has just gone out and the reviews of the goodie bag gifts has been positive. After more than a year’s involvement in this project i’m quite glad we now actually have something to show for it. Even if i will only be able to give invites to to the feminine part of my potential client base :)
This past week also saw the launch of the new Sandwich_ website, i’m especially pleased with the shop finder we created from scratch using the Google Maps API and the nice fallbacks for non-flash browsers (read; iPad). A nice little project that we’ll spend some time tweaking over the coming weeks.
With those two projects launched i find myself with a bit more time to spend on fresh.li again, and i guess i’ll need to start looking out for new interesting projects come february/march.
/dev/haag turned out really well. Seems we’ve managed to get a kick ass organizing team together. We got some great speakers and i think we creates a nice open and relaxed atmosphere. I hope we’ll see a few people return for the next event which is due the 25th of february. Do sign up for the next event, that we can keep you posted on the latest concerning speakers and other news.
Moving pictures: this week was dedicated to Misfits, a very british SF comedy on some delinquents and a rather nasty electrical storm.
Printed letters: lost quite a few hours of sleep at night being immersed in The Atrocity Archives, the wacky spy/necromancer stories by SF favorite Charles Stross. It’s sort of a smart version of the BBC series Torchwood (if i was pushed to label it).
Weeknote 212/213
I organized the first OpenCoffee at Nomadz january 5th which i personally thought a success. 12 people showed up and i got to talk to almost everybody as did most other people. It was short and sweet with the last person leaving just after 11 leaving an actual workday. And the group was nice and mixed with everything from new startups and business development guys to photographers and programmers. As we (Pascal van Hecke and me) opted to rotate the venues the next one will be at Igluu, then we’ll have one at Workalot in the Caballero fabriek, and then we’ll get back at Nomadz April 6th.
Our new /dev/haag meetup is also just around the corner, another few days and about 20 people will meet at Nomadz to listen to workshops on Interaction Design and Data Journalism and just have a good time and some drinks. Very much looking forward to it. We still have some spots left if you’d like to join us. We tweaked the format a bit so it’s now from 1pm to 5pm after which we head of for drinks. This shorter format should make it bit easier to attend for more people. Feel free to just drop in for drinks as well if you really can’t make it during the day.
Liz & Vic is probably only a week left from becoming available as a closed beta by now so that’s very exciting. I spent the past few weeks fixing some small bugs but development is now almost completely handed over to the new team at Liz & Vic and they seem to be doing a great job. This is becoming one good looking site and i can’t wait for it to go live so i can finally start showing it to people. We first started talking about this project at least a year ago so i’m also just glad to wrap it up and start with new stuff as you can probably imagine.
Next week we’ll launch another website for Veldhoven Group (more fashion!), this one for consumers in contrast to most of my earlier work for Veldhoven which has been internal, (iPad) prototypes and sites for business clients only (B2B).
We interviewed a job applicant but it turned out the university where he currently worked had offered him a PhD position in the meantime so instead of working for us he’ll be researching how to make robots undertand emotion from visual cues. Which if i’m honest sounds even more fun than building web apps so i can’t blame him for taking up that opportunity first.
I’ve started some explorative work on a new side project i’ve been meaning to do for a long while now. Since i have no idea if i’ll actually finish it this time i’ll only say it has something to do with entertainment and Twitter and that it gives me a good chance to try out Djangy and work on my Django/Python skills.
Posts i should write but haven’t got around to; An exploration of payment providers (how does it work, what are the options, what should i base my choices on) and a similar post regarding the new crop of cloud deployment (not to be confused with old school cloud hosting like Amazon EC2) services. I’m noting that here so i’ll have to write them at some point.
Weeknote 210/211
One week in and i’m already behind. While these weeks are mostly filled with work i did find some time for holiday spirit. Luckily weeknotes can remain solidly corporate and staid so i will not go into that, at all.
As this was the time of the big holiday fresh.li update i spent many hours counting down to that special moment while upgrading the app to the latest cake release and rewriting the way images are resized. I’m now almost happy with the way i’ve set things up which is quick, not utterly reliant on Amazon S3 and easy to swap out for something running on it’s own server should all hell break loose.
Besides a few blank screens during upgrade time probably none of my fresh.li users noticed anything. The update consisted mostly of backend fixes and upgrades. Sylvia and i did clear the way for a new template, a new payment system and some other goodies though so we’ve assured ourselves of some good hours of work over the weekends to come.
Besides that my time was spent mostly on two big clients with two big deadlines. Both Cake projects and both cool in their own ways but i’ll just post link when their up and running.
Today was mostly spent trying out the awesome Djangy service (thanks Killian), which is Heroku for Django which is basically web application deployment made painless. If you have no idea what i’m talking about imagine being a writer. One day you decide your little opus might actually be finished and instead of calling your publisher you just upload it to xyz.net, hit publish and bam! your book is on Amazon for everybody to buy. It’s like that only replace books with code and publisher with IT department.
Also DODlab posted our announcement regarding /dev/haag, were now expecting 15-20 people and we have a few workshops lined up. Still have room for more though so feel free to join us the 21st.
Week 209
I stopped blogging a few years back in favor of quick updates on whatever was the microblog service du jour and that worked fine for me for a long time. But more and more i find myself without the max character limit to share something a bit more long form. So in the footsteps of some of my designer friends i’ve decided to start posting weeknotes to this very blog for the coming few months and see how i like it. What your reading now is my first weeknote in the 209th week of my business; Automatique.
The big news this week is that i’m no longer a sole trader! This week Sylvia started working for Automatique as my business partner. Starting january the 1st we’ll make this official by turning Automatique into a VOF (no good english term for this i think, guess association comes closest?). Sylvia will be concentrating on the design & front-end part of the business while i’ll keep doing backend and technical design as per usual.
The focus this week tended to be on talking and writing and not so much on coding. I’ve wrote estimates for a crowd sourced video startup and gourmet olive oil kingpin and had talks with a similarly diverse group of businesses. All in all it seems like people are gearing up for the new year already which is promising.
I did get to do some work on a pretty cool Google Maps based store finder app together with Richard for one of our clients, will post a link as soon as i can.
In non-consultancy news i’m gearing up for a christmas refresh of the fresh.li codebase and compared and tested an awful lot of payment service providers that i’m hopeful will lead to replacing PayPal with a less annoying credit card processor after the christmas update is up and running. I’ll be sure to writeup some of my finds and recommendations concerning PSP services for startups after i have made the switch.
A few weeks back Andy contacted me and others about The Hague based events where techies could meetup and we came to the conclusion that we needed to start one ourselves. So after much deliberation and a few beers we set out to create /dev/haag; a monthly meetup at Nomadz for ‘makers’. This week i threw a quick wiki online so we could start fleshing out the details. Feel free to sign up and join us friday the 21st of January!
