Week 360

At the beginning of the week we tidied up a few loose ends on the Smart Answers project, before throwing ourselves wholeheartedly into disposing of the company’s possessions and preparing for life without a physical office.

Smart Answers

Chris finished off a load of additions and improvements to the documentation and then helped Erik get some changes to the Minimum Wage Calculator merged.

I merged the change which memoizes node presenters. Hopefully this should reduce the app’s memory footprint a bit. I then finished up the removal of all the multiple-question-per-page code and got it merged. It felt really good to be deleting more code!

I also got a couple of other small improvements merged: removing the unused SmartAnswerPresenter#page_title method and renaming SmartAnswerPresenter to FlowPresenter.

Disposing of stuff

Chris did a great job of getting lots of things photographed and listed on Gumtree. He also did the bulk of replying to Gumtree emails and coordinating of times for people to collect items. Thanks, Chris!

During the week we visited our Urban Locker storage unit a few times to photograph items and bring some things back to the office. In hindsight we agreed that we should’ve had a clear-out of the stuff in the storage unit when we took on the office at Shoreditch Works, but inevitably it was just too easy to keep putting it off.

Show & Tell

Given how much we had going on, it would’ve been easy to cancel the Show & Tell, but I’m glad we didn’t. I’ll leave Chris to tell you about the event in more detail (it’s his turn to do the write-up), but suffice to say we had a good crowd and some interesting demos.

We’re not sure what we’re going to do about running these events in the New Year, but it would be good to keep them going in some form if we can.

Admin

Pension auto-enrolment

We decided to register a NEST pension scheme to cover our auto-enrolment responsibilities. Annoyingly, although Chris’ existing pension qualifies for auto-enrolment, mine doesn’t. The NEST registration process was frustratingly painful - full of non-pasteable password/PIN fields, stupid password rules, and other bits of poor user experience - but we got there in the end.

Missing payment

Our contract with GDS goes via two (!) intermediaries, Capita and Digital Gurus, and recently the latter managed to forget a payment. Luckily our eagle-eyed book-keeper¹ spotted the mistake and after a bit of chasing the payment came through.

Change of company address

Since we won’t have a physical office in the New Year, we kicked off the process of changing our company address with the relevant authorities. It’s pretty depressing that we still have to change our address separately with various bits of government (even several different bits of HMRC!), although it did feel as if the requests were processed slightly quicker this time round.

Anyway, that all for this week.

– James