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.
