Week 531

Business development

I’ve been away and off sick for much of this week, but my doughty colleagues have embarked on a flurry of business development activities including a number of meetings with prospective clients. My sense is that they’ve really enjoyed meeting a bunch of new people and hearing about new projects in a variety of problem domains. I’m very appreciative of their efforts and hopefully something will come to fruition in the not too distant future.

Outreach

Chris L spent a day working at the Outlandish office in Finsbury Park. it’s always lovely to catch up with the Outlandish folk and it’s a good way to stay in touch with all things CoTech. He also took some time to talk Data Science with a charity in his role as a DataKind UK ambassador.

Adventures in Elm

Amongst other things, Ben has made a foray into the world of Youtube using OBS Studio to record himself using Elm to implement the Starship Takeoff game from the Computer Spacegames book published by Usborne in the 1980s. I’m so impressed that he’s able to write code and explain what he’s doing at the same time. Unfortunately he hasn’t yet published any of the videos, but watch this space!

It’s been great to see Chris R get stuck into Elm development this week ably assisted from time-to-time by Ben. He’s been working through some tutorials for a little while, but recently he’s started work on a new user interface feature for Mission Patch. Indeed he had got it to the point where he was able to demonstrate it at our Show & Tell event on Wednesday.

Show & Tell event

We had hoped to host the Show & Tell event in the main meeting room in our new office block, but it turns out another company has booked the room every Wednesday evening for months into the future 😞. So instead we returned to the excellent meeting room at Proper Office in Shoreditch. We might consider changing the day of the week we run the event so we can make use of the meeting room here, so if you have strong opinions about this, please get in touch!

VAT for EU Sales

Over the week or so I’ve spent way too long trying to understand the byzantine rules about how to apply VAT to Mission Patch sales to customers in the EU. This has been complicated by the fact that we sell both physical and digital products and that we sell to both businesses and consumers. It feels good to have finally got my head round it all, but potentially all a bit pointless if we end up crashing out of the EU in the coming weeks! 💩

Mission Patch

Today we chatted about how work on Mission Patch has stalled a bit - particularly non-development related tasks. We’ve agreed to hold daily stand-up meetings every morning next week to try to get ourselves back on track. I’m extremely proud of what we’ve accomplished so far - it still gives me a kick to see each notification of a sale and to see the printed patches people have designed - but I’m sure we can take the project a lot further if we put our minds to it! 🚀

Just in case you’re teetering on the brink of making a Mission Patch purchase, the ITSFRIDAY discount code will give you 10% off. 🎉

Until next time!

– James