Weeks 537 and 538

The good news is that we have some work! With Outlandish on the School Cuts project and with FutureLearn.

We’re incredibly grateful to Outlandish for thinking of us and helping us out when they knew we were looking for projects. Thank you!

Chris and James started working with FutureLearn this week and Ben and I will join them next week. I’m looking forward to seeing where they’ve got to since we were last involved a few years ago.

School Cuts

The website is comprised of a JSON API and WordPress plus AngularJS frontend. Our main goal has been to import updated information about schools in Northern Ireland but we’ve mostly been refactoring to make that easier. The API database, API and Angular apps were quite tightly coupled which meant that importing updated data often required changes in all three places. We’ve attempted to improve this by introducing a new version of the API and generalising the Angular app so that updating the data should be as simple as importing it into the API. We’ll find out how well we’ve done as soon as we have the latest data signed off and ready to import.

Business development

We’ve continued to email and talk to people about possible future work. I think we’re getting better at this although it definitely still pushes me out of my comfort zone. It’s the sort of activity that has traditionally suffered when we take on project work but I’m hoping that we’ll be able to use this recent project drought to motivate us to continue even when we’re busy.

Contracts and accounts

I’ve reviewed the FutureLearn contract and our annual accounts this week. Neither of which I feel particularly confident doing nor particularly enjoy; and both of which have taken ages. I wonder whether we’d be better off paying someone to do these sort of things for us.

That’s about all for now.

Until next time.

– Chris