Week 255

Afternoon y’all. I trust you’re all keeping well. Oh, and I also trust that you’re coming to our Christmas partay on Wednesday the 18th. You are coming. Right?

Anyway, enough partay talk, let’s get down to bidnes.

As is the norm, James and I have once again spent this week splitting our time between FutureLearn and GFR.

Development at FutureLearn continues to go well, although we did have a interesting discussion in the week where it became clear that different people had different ideas about the outcome of a planning meeting. It was quickly resolved, but it’s always interesting to learn how different people interpret the same situation. In this case, we found that different people had a different understanding behind the motivations for splitting a rather chunky story up into smaller pieces: Were we splitting it into easily digestible developer chunks that were all still required before the feature could be deployed, or were we splitting it into independently valuable pieces of functionality. My preference is always for the latter and this situation has made me realise that I’d like to get better at explaining why I think that.

Continuing with FutureLearn for a moment; we’re going to be working up until Christmas and possibly on until the end of January at which point we’re planning to take a couple of weeks of GFR time. Being busy with FutureLearn has meant that we haven’t really had time to digest the effect of Tom and James leaving us; something that we do want to think about. Can we continue to sell ourselves in the same way now that we’re down to two? Should we consider moving into more of a coaching/teaching role? Should we try to grow the company? We don’t have any answers right now (we barely even know the questions) but we are in a fortunate enough position to be able to afford the time to discuss these important things in the new year.

We also spent a short while this week meeting with a small startup. They were initially after developers but have since asked if we’d like to be involved at some kind of advisory level. This isn’t something we’ve done before but I’d like to think that we’ll consider it. I’d like us to be making more of our experience to help people and maybe this is a way to do just that.

I think that’ll do us for this week. Until next time, folks.

– Chris