Week 518

Ben, Chris R & I continued to work on the Crown Marketplace project until Tuesday when we had the final Show & Tell, retrospective, and a celebratory team lunch.

As Chris L mentioned last week, it’s disappointing that, due to forces outside our control, nothing has gone live yet. However, we’re hopeful that at least one of the “frameworks” we worked on will go live in January and I’m confident we’ve done everything we can to make that possible. Ben & I also popped over to dxw on Wednesday afternoon to participate in a handover session.

We’ve really enjoyed working with dxw on the project and, as Ben put it in a recent tweet, it feels a bit sad to be stopping work just as we were starting to turn into a team. Hopefully we’ll have the opportunity to work with them again in the not too distant future.

Meanwhile Chris L continued to push forward on the business development front. He also made some great progress on the internal project we’ve mentioned previously which aims to help teams celebrate success. It’s been really motivating to see this progress while fighting our way through the last bit of client work of 2018. Hopefully we can all work on it early next year and get it launched!

On Wednesday, we had our last company meeting of the year via appear.in since we were all remote. On Thursday, well-deserved holidays beckoned with Chris R heading off to Australia and Chris L to Mexico. Have great trips, both of you!

On Thursday, Ben & I did a bit of admin to get the company shipshape for the Xmas & New Year period and did a bit more business development. In the afternoon, Ben played around building an animation using Elm for the internal project mentioned above. And I read up about AWS Step Functions to see whether they would be useful in my conversion of our Trello backup code from a cron job to a couple of AWS Lambda Functions.

As we come to the end of the year, I want to take the opportunity to say a big thank-you to Ben, Chris L & Chris R for being such great colleagues. Some of the projects we’ve worked on this year have been pretty challenging at times and they’ve made me even more appreciative of the supportive environment we’ve created at GFR. Also amidst it all there’s been a lot of good humour and fun times - here’s to more of that in 2019!

The team at Go Free Range wish you a Merry Xmas and a Happy New Year.

Until next year.

– James