Week 585

Week beginning Mon 30 March.

• Chris and his partner welcomed their second child into the world. I understand they’re all at home and well. Congratulations. This is wonderful news :-)

• Ben and James started working with FutureLearn after they got in touch to ask whether we could help cover some of their team working reduced hours.

• I worked on a new interface for the Lightbox project that aims to guide researchers through the process of including lighting data in their papers.

• We agreed to exercise the break clause in our office lease only to learn that our landlord was happy for us to move to a rolling monthly contract at a greatly reduced rate to store our equipment. We’ve taken this option as it avoids us having to collect/store our equipment and gives us some hope we’ll be back in there in future.

• We’ve explored some of the options available to help us through this time. We’ve furloughed Chris, postponed our next VAT payment, investigated the Business Interruption Loan Scheme, learnt that we’re hopefully eligible for the Small Business Grant Scheme and have started exploring how much we can afford to reduce our salary by.

• We’ve retired our self-hosted errbit instance in favour of Rollbar. The cost of maintaining our own instance was outweighing any benefits we might’ve seen.

• We’ve configured freerange.coop to redirect to gofreerange.com. We’ve had freerange.coop since becoming a member of Coops UK and figured we should do something with it even if that’s just configuring a redirect. We had a brief conversation about making it our primary domain but it felt like that warranted some more thought/discussion.

• James has written a blog post to describe how he’s using the AWS CDK to automatically backup our company Trello boards to AWS S3

• We used Whereby for our monthly drinks on Wednesday. I thought it worked really well and I enjoyed spending an hour or two catching up with folks.

• There’s a new Slack channel for the Catalyst Digital Teams network, which alerted me to a project Outlandish completed for Business in the Community in just over 24 hours! It’s inspiring to see people from various, potentially competing, organisations sharing leads and working out how to work together.

• We used our monthly charitable donation to contribute to the crowdfunder for Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) for NHS Staff.