Week 324

We started the week by discussing what we should focus on. We reminded ourselves that our main priority outside of paid work is to work toward creating something that’s able to generate revenue. Of the projects we’ve been investigating recently, we felt that GFR Video had the best chance of doing that and agreed that we should put some more effort into it.

GFR Video

We haven’t really done anything with GFR Video since starting FutureLearn back in week 304 so it took us quite a while to get back into it.

We agreed that the primary goal should be to try to work out whether anyone would use the service. The first step toward that is to try to come up with some prices for the service. To that end, we’re trying to use the AWS Cost Calculator, and some hopefully realistic numbers, to come up with some estimated monthly costs of running the service.

AIS on SDR

Although we agreed not to focus on this project, we did spend some time chatting about where we’d got to, and coming up with some next actions.

James was able to extract some data from the recordings he made when crossing the Solent.

Client work

We continued working through the contractual process for the new work we’re hoping to start soon. It probably took us a good half day to read, gather and sign all relevant paper work but hopefully everything’s now in place for an imminent start.

GFR Admin

We’ve been using Trello for a while now but have recently been feeling a little overwhelmed by the number of things in our To do list. Not only has the list been steadily growing but we were getting into the habit of prioritising newer tasks which resulted in quite a few cards staying at the bottom and never getting worked on.

To address both the number of tasks and the prioritisation of newer cards we’ve made a couple of tweaks to our process:

• We try to keep the To do list focussed on the tasks that we hope to complete this week.

• We use a Triage list for new cards that arise during the week.

• We introduced a new Later list for cards that we might want to do at sometime, but not this week.

• We re-instated our weekly planning to try to keep on top of the system.

It’ll be interesting to see how this works out, particularly given that we’re hoping to start client work again soon.

Social

James and I met with Thomas Granier at Equal Experts. Thomas and James used to work with each other at Thoughtworks. It was interesting to hear that Equal Experts rely heavily on their Associate (Contractor) Network to deliver their client work: It reminded both of us of the idea behind version 1 of GFR.

Until next time.

– Chris