Week 395

This week we started work on the Hookline music library project. Although we’ve got a bit of a backlog of company admin to do (especially writing week notes!), we’ve decided to try to catch up gradually; not in one big push.

This week was also the first week in several months in which we didn’t work on Smart Answers, however it’s great to see that one of our recommendations has already been taken forward. We wish the relatively newly-formed Content Tools team, who are responsible for Smart Answers, all the best for the future!

Hookline

We spent most of the week working on the music library project. It took us a while to remember where we’d got to with it and to work out what to work on next, but we’ve definitely made some good progress.

On Monday, Chris, Amy & I met up and worked on the project in the Barbican Kitchen. It’s quite a pleasant place to work with easy access to the lakeside terrace, but it does get quite noisy at times and the public wi-fi is a bit flakey.

On Tuesday afternoon, Chris & I met up in the Barbican and continued work on the project on the floor above the main foyer. This was generally a bit quieter and the wi-fi seemed to be a bit more reliable. On Wednesday, Chris, Amy & I met up in the Barbican Cinema Café and we were joined later in the morning by Mike who’s working with Amy & Rach at Hookline.

Amy gave Mike a quick tour of the current state of the music library web app. Then Mike walked us through how he performs some common tasks for managing Hookline’s music catalogue. It was really useful to see some of the tools Mike uses and what some of the main pain points are.

We picked up lunch from the Whitecross Street Market and sat out on the Barbican lakeside terrace to it eat. Over lunch it was interesting to hear about some of Mike’s research into binaural audio in VR gaming.

Currently Hookline are managing their music library in Dropbox, but the music files and metadata exists in few different places. Our plan is to import the music and metadata into the web app and have that as a single canonical data source. We continued to work on making steps towards this goal during the rest of the week.

Show & Tell

We held our 23rd Show & Tell event on Wednesday evening. We’d booked a room at the Star of Kings, but since we didn’t think many people were coming, we ended up moving the meeting to the Wood Street Bar at the last minute. Unfortunately we forgot to update Lanyrd and so it took Riccardo a while to find us - thanks to Tom H for pointing Riccardo in the right direction!

Hopefully a write-up of this event will appear on this website in the not too distant future. If you fancy coming along to future events, please do get in touch.

Sales pipeline

On Tuesday morning, Chris headed off to meet a prospective client in Southwark. This was someone who had first got in touch while we were both abroad, so it was great that one of us finally got to chat to them.

We’ve had a few discussions with prospective clients over the last couple of months, but we haven’t yet decided whether/when we might want to do some more client work.

Week notes

Chris kick-started our week note re-boot by writing up and publishing notes for week 393 while the week’s events were still fresh in his mind. Well done, Chris!

Anyway, I think that’s all for now. Let’s hope we can keep up this run of writing week notes on time!

– James