Week 325

This was our last week before starting a new client engagement. It was also another short week due to the Easter Monday bank holiday. We spent most of Tuesday catching up with admin.

RubyForge

During the morning I noticed that the RubyForge web server seemed to have sprung back to life, perhaps triggered by the stirling work Tom S had done on his rubyforge-redirects project.

I noticed this because mocha.rubyforge.org now correctly redirects to the relevant path on gofreerange.com. The fact that the web server is up and running again is good news, because although many RubyForge-hosted projects have moved their sites elsewhere, there are plenty of pages on the web which still link to their previously-defunct rubyforge.org URLs.

Show & Tell

On Tuesday we also popped up to our self-storage locker and retrieved our projector, Apple TV, Chromecast, etc in time for the Show & Tell event on Wednesday.

Both Chris and I spent most of Wednesday itself preparing something to show at the event. I quickly realised I wasn’t going to have anything particularly amazing to demo, so I decided to spend the time putting together a basic presentation in an attempt to explain what I’ve been trying to do on my AIS on SDR project.

It was the first time we’d held the event in our new office at Shoreditch Works. Although space was at a bit of a premium, I think the event went off well - I certainly found it interesting. Thanks to everyone for coming!

Accountancy

Later in the week, Chris finished off sorting out the Prepayments bucket in our FreeAgent accounts. This turned out to be a bit of a Herculean task, so it’s really good to have got it sorted. What’s more Chris has written up some excellent notes which should really help if we ever have to look at such transactions again.

At around the same time, with the first payroll of the tax year looming, I was busy trying to work out how much we should pay ourselves and how to divvy things up between salary and dividends. As part of this I wanted to better understand how we’d come up with such figures in the past.

It was almost certainly overkill, but I ended up building a giant spreadsheet which calculated employee NI contributions, employer NI contributions, income tax on salary, income tax on dividends, and corporation tax. This allowed us to try out a bunch of combinations of salary and dividends, so we could come up with a sensible plan.

GFR Video

We spent most of Friday finishing up the work we’d started on figuring out the underlying costs of the GFR Video project. Unfortunately these calculations were interrupted by some more form-filling for our new client, but I think we managed to come to a conclusion of sorts. Now we need just need to work out what to do next!

Social

On Thursday we met Murray for lunch at the Strongroom Bar & Kitchen - it was such a lovely day we were able to sit and eat outside in the sun - good times!

And on Friday afternoon we joined in the fortnightly Shoreditch Works Mixer event. It was nice to meet and chat to a few more of our new neighbours including the folk from whatleads.to and Andiamo.

That’s all folks.

– James