Weeks 520 to 524

G’day folks. I’m back in chilly London after spending the end of December and all of January visiting family and friends in Australia. I had imagined working for a couple of weeks while we were there but it soon became apparent that that wasn’t going to happen. I feel very fortunate to work in an organisation, and with people, that make this possible. Thanks chaps.

I’ve spent the past couple of days catching up on what’s been happening in my absence and figured I was well placed to write about it.

Ben, Chris and James have had a productive start to the year. They’ve already made some great progress on some of the things we’d hoped to achieve in 2019 and we’re only 5 weeks into the year!

Mission Patch

We built a thing! Well. Ben, Chris and James built a thing while I was busy doing nothing. Mission Patch makes it super easy to design and print mission patch stickers to help your team celebrate success. Give it a go and let us know what you think.

We’ve had a bunch of orders although there’s still quite a way to go before it could be classed as sustainable. Irrespective, it’s still incredibly satisfying to earn money from something we’ve built. Thanks to everyone who’s helped by buying patches and by giving us early feedback: it’s much appreciated.

Building products is something we’ve wanted to do for a long time so I’m really happy to see this live.

Moving office

We’re moving to a new office next week. Our current Ministry of Startups office has served us really well but the East London location isn’t great for me. Fortunately for me, Ben, Chris and James have very kindly agreed to move closer to Waterloo to make my commute slightly less painful :-) To that end we’re moving into The Foundry which is where I first met Ben and James at Reevoo back in 2005. I’m looking forward to exploring the area again and discovering what’s changed in the 12 years since we were last there.

If you’re looking for very affordable office or desk space then I can highly recommended the Ministry and it’s possible we’ll rejoin them if they open buildings closer to Waterloo.

Becoming a co-op

We’ve paid The Hive to help us update our governing documents to make them compatible with the co-operative principles. We’re going to be working with Siôn Whellens of Calverts. We’ve met Siôn at a few CoTech events and I’m looking forward to working with him on this change to GFR.

And the rest

We hosted a well attended Show & Tell 51 at Proper Office in Shoreditch. We’ll be hosting Show & Tell 52 in The Foundry on Wed 20 Feb. These events are open to everyone so feel free to join us if it sounds like something you might be interested in.

Chris attended the Outlandish Xmas party. As far as he can remember he had a good time.

Chris and James met GFR-alumni Kalv for lunch while he was over in London. Hi Kalv :-)

We’re currently looking for our next project and have been ramping up business development efforts during the month. Get in touch if there’s something you think we can help with.

James finished decommissioning our Linode server. This involved migrating the apps hosted on the server to a combination of Heroku, GitHub Pages and AWS. He also took the opportunity to move our DNS to a provider that offered a few more features than Linode. We hope this work will reduce the maintenance overhead of running these sites and services. Thanks for all this work, James.

James has been revisiting R&D tax credits to see whether they might be any more relevant to us given some of the recent work we’ve been doing.

We were very pleased to see the supply teachers component of the Crown Marketplace go live in January.

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

– Chris