Week 517

Ben, James and I have spent most of the week working on the Crown Marketplace app while Chris split his time between working on an internal project, working on the Modern Slavery Registry project and on some business development.

Crown Marketplace

I’ve finally emerged from what feels like weeks of working on the migration of an existing Excel spreadsheet into the web application. It’s proved particularly hard because there are 3 conflicting descriptions of how it should work (two documents and the Excel spreadsheet itself), and no single person that seems to fully understand it.

Ben and James have been busy trying to tidy up lots of loose ends in what are the last few days of our last sprint on the project: our engagement ends on Tuesday next week. We’re really quite disappointed not to see the work we’ve done go live before we leave the project but hopefully we’ve done enough to make it as easy as possible for future developers (possibly us) to get it launched.

Modern Slavery Registry

After an initial couple of weeks work on the project earlier this year we switched to spending a day per month working on the project. We’ve struggled a bit with this arrangement because it always takes a while to get back into the project before we can actually make progress. Chris spoke to the product owners this week and suggested we batch up the remaining 4 days of the contract in order to make better use of the time. There was also some discussion about additional funding in the new financial year.

Business development

Chris has been doing a great job of finding out more about some of the interesting opportunities available through the Innovation Funding Service. We’re particularly keen to see whether we can collaborate on any of them and to that end Chris has started talking to some of fellow CoTech members.

Helping teams celebrate success

Chris has been making excellent progress on the side project we’ve had ticking along in the background since around May this year. It’s really starting to look like something we can imagine people using. We’re hoping to spend some focussed time on this project in January so hopefully we’ll be able to reveal more soon.

Becoming a co-op

Although we’re fairly comfortable describing ourselves as a worker co-op (it’s how we operate in practice) we’re very aware that our governing documents contain clauses that mean we can’t yet be a member of Co-operatives UK. We’ve been thinking and talking about becoming a proper co-op for a long time and Chris has kicked off the process again by applying for help from The Hive to update our governing documents.

Decommissioning our VPS

James is continuing to work on decommissioning our Linode VPS. We’ve decided that it’s probably cheaper overall to pay to host things elsewhere (e.g. Heroku and AWS) than it is to pay for our time to maintain the server. James is doing a great job of working through the various things hosted on the server and moving them elsewhere. The static version of Caffeine Monitor is now hosted on GitHub Pages, the GFR Video service has been shut down today and he’s nearly finished migrating a Ruby script + cronjob combination to AWS Lambda.

I think that’s about it for this week. Have good weekends y’all.