Week 313

This week was a bit sad, because it was the last week we had our office at 87 Worship Street in Shoreditch – the lease came to an end on Sunday. As you may have read in previous week notes, the landlord has almost doubled the rent and we can’t justify paying that much, so we’ve reluctantly decided to move out.

Computation Club

Before moving out we hosted one last edition of the London Computation Club. This week we worked through the exercises in chapter 4 of Elements of Computing Systems which involved writing a couple of small programs in the eclectic HACK assembly language. I thoroughly enjoyed the evening and I’m looking forward to the next meeting which will be hosted by Leo Cassarini at Geckoboard.

Down Under

Chris is now on the New Zealand leg of his Antipodean adventure and it looks as if he & Amy are having a lot of fun!

A photo posted by Amy Wagner (@amyeeew) on Jan 17, 2015 at 4:29pm PST

Moving Out

I spent all week in the office (i.e. not at FutureLearn) preparing for the move – administrivia, disassembling furniture, packing, cleaning, etc. On Wednesday morning Hackney Council took away the older chairs and desks that we inherited from the previous tenants and later that day the British Heart Foundation collected a couple of sofas that were surplus to requirements.

I managed to get everything packed up in the nick of time for Rocket Van to move the rest of our stuff into our Urban Locker self-storage unit on Thursday and luckily everything fitted in OK. Thanks to Tom S and Tom T for their help and forbearance all week and thanks to James A who helped out on the day of the move.

I spent the rest of Thursday getting the place cleaned up and handed the keys over to the landlord on Friday morning.

End of an era pic.twitter.com/hAAV1l9ZbG

— Tom Stuart (@tomstuart) January 15, 2015

Kalv

Kalv, a GFR alumnus, was in town on Friday and a group of us met up with him for a very enjoyable lunch at the Strongroom Bar & Kitchen – Kalv emigrated to Vancouver in Canada back in 2011. It was really interesting to hear about his experiences of looking for funding for a JavaScript analytics product, Caliper, and subsequently of setting up and running the successful company, Brewhouse Software.

Prospect

Later on Friday I headed over to Fitzrovia to meet a prospective client. I’d be the first to admit that “sales” is not one of my strong points, so I was a little apprehensive about going to this meeting on my own. However, the people were very friendly and I hope I did a reasonable job of explaining how GFR works and why we choose to work that way.

That’s all folks.

– James