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!
