Week 327

Aloha, folks.

We spent four days of week 327 working with our new client. I’m really enjoying the work. It’s certainly challenging but I feel that we’re gradually understanding the problem and starting to see some possible directions to move in.

Being on a client project has reminded me how difficult it is to keep up with the day-to-day running of GFR. I’m struggling to find/make the time to do anything GFR related until the Friday we spend in our own office.

Social department

We met a few more new people at the Shoreditch Works mixer on Friday. We had an interesting chat with Francis, a lawyer specialising in contract law. We’ve always assumed contracts have to be complicated and hard to understand because they include certain legalese terms that don’t mean much in English. It turns out that this isn’t the case! All contracts should be understandable and it was good to hear that there’s a small movement of people trying to push this idea forward.

Office management department

Having spent almost an entire week stuck to our wall, our GFR sign decided it’d had enough and came crashing down just as I got to the office on Friday morning. Here it is in happier times (approximately 6.5 days before it’d had enough of the wall).

Development department

GFR Video

We spent a little more time investigating the underlying pricing of GFR Video. Based on using Amazon AWS it looks like we might be more expensive that the list prices of some alternative video providers. We’re not sure what the next step is at the moment but it might be useful to compare the price of using some alternatives to AWS, or to see whether we could simply resell the AWS services and hope that people would be willing to pay us a small amount for gluing them together.

Scratching an itch

I spent an hour or so exploring an idea for scratching an itch I have. Every quarter we receive an email from HMRC saying that our VAT return is due. This happens infrequently enough that I never remember what we’re supposed to do with the email. I initially created a wiki page describing what to do with these emails but that’s only useful if I remember to look at the wiki. I figured I’d go one step further and ended up creating a bookmarklet that can detect this type of email in the Gmail web interface and add a link to the wiki page. I’ve been thinking about this sort of utility for a while so it was good to get a proof of concept together that I can use to evaluate whether this is actually useful or not. You can see the bookmarklet in my gist should you be so inclined.

PR department

Diana wrote about us on the Shoreditch Works blog.

GFR Admin

The big news of the week is that we registered for Telephone Banking! Exciting times!

Not able to top that, I’ll say cheerio for now. I hope y’all have a good weekend, and that those of you in the UK enjoy the early May bank holiday.

– Chris