Weeks 581 & 582

Howdi folks. I hope you’re all staying physically and mentally healthy during these strange times.

• James enjoyed a well-deserved break during week 581.

• Chris and I enjoyed catching up with some friends at the Little Creatures Brewery for our monthly drinks.

• We attended our quarterly away day. We hired a meeting room for the morning and used it to discuss our business model. I don’t think we came away with any concrete actions but I think we did come away with a better shared understanding of what each of us is trying to get out of the company. After a pub lunch we headed to Draughts in Waterloo. I enjoyed playing Forbidden Desert: the sequel to Forbidden Island that we played last time. I was once again impressed by the suspense/tension that can be generated by a board game.

• We started working from home more. Even before it became official guidance the trains and streets were noticeably quieter. Presumably because lots of other people are doing the same.

• Chris and I spoke to Manuel (the product owner of the Lightbox project) about priorities. It’s become clearer during development that there are two main use cases for the product and that we’ve been trying to cater to both of them with a single interface. We’ve identified the primary use case and are going to focus on building an interface that works well for that in the first instance.

• Most of our time was spent on sprint 12 of The Audience Agency project. We only have two sprints remaining in our current contract but are in discussions to extend.

TAA

• Made some improvements to the way we calculate catchment areas for venues. This is good but we’re still struggling to explain what the catchment area is so there’s more work to do.

• Added the ability to print to PDF. We’re using an AWS Lambda and headless Chrome to allow users to print the report using the print stylesheet.

• Finished internationalising the app by moving all hardcoded strings to Localeapp. The Welsh translation is mostly complete although the functionality hasn’t been opened up to end users just yet.

• Added the ability for users to download their survey responses. We’re also asking them to (optionally) tell us why they’re downloading the data to see whether we might be able to build something more useful based on the use cases.

• Added a new Insight showing audience segmented by Mosaic UK.

• Managed to trigger a bug in ruby-statistics that caused the Rails app to hang! Ben and I paired on tracing the problem and have reported it as an issue in the project.

• Started working on some improvements to the way TAA’s customers categorise their performances. This is quite manually intensive at the moment so we’re hoping we can see some big impacts from the work we do.

• Removed some access control we had in place. We’ve invited over half of all existing users to try the app so it was just adding unnecessary complexity.