Week 528

James and Ben had an unplanned week away from the Ctrl Group so they focussed on Mission Patch while Chris and I concentrated on the Modern Slavery Registry.

Mission Patch

The big news in Mission Patch is that you can now use emojis in your patches! We’re using Google’s Noto Color Emoji and I think they look great. We’ve already had a few orders using these new images, and Chris has used them to recreate the Apollo 11 mission patch and to design new images for the Mission Patch homepage. The limited number of images has been raised quite a few times in feedback we’ve received so we’re hoping that these additions go someway toward addressing it. Let us know what you think.

While Ben was busy working on the emoji support, James was adding some basic order tracking to the app. We’re not currently using a database so this was a bit more challenging than it might otherwise have been. We’ve also started to put some lightweight processes around the fulfilment of orders with the aim of ensuring they’re delivered in a timely manner while not taking up too much of our time. To that end we’ve used Gophr a couple of times to book same day bike couriers to transport the printed stickers from Puck Studio to our office. I’ve been quite impressed by the service so far.

I got my first real taste of Elm while spending a couple of hours pairing with Ben on Friday. I was mostly able to follow along but it still feels quite alien. I hope to get more hands on with the code in the near future.

We also spent a couple of hours planning Mission Patch work in the week. Having discussed our motivations for the project we all agreed it was something we wanted to continue working on. We’ve set ourselves a modest target of the number of weekly orders we’d like to be taking and have prioritised tasks based on their likelihood of increasing traffic to the site or of increasing the conversion rate of visitors to the site. This isn’t something we have much collective experience of so it’s going to be an interesting learning curve.

Modern Slavery Registry

Chris and I continued to work on the Modern Slavery Registry. We finally finished modelling the relationship between a statement and companies that it applies to. This was previously modelled as a free text field containing a comma separated list of company names. It took longer than we’d hoped but it was very satisfying to see it finished.

It’s unclear whether we’re going to be involved in the project in future so we spent quite a while updating the README to include information that should hopefully allow any new maintainers to pick it up.

I think that’s probably about it for now. Until next time.

– Chris