Week 300

Week 300 was obviously in a hurry. Both James and I felt that it flew by!

We mostly kept ourselves busy working on the Video project, discussing new client work, talking about what we’re going to do for an office in 2015 and talking about how we might bring more people in to GFR.

Video Project

We had hoped to have been to ask some people to test our video service by the end of the week but didn’t quite get there. We did manage to do a number of things that get us much closer to that goal, though:

• Added a simple way of inviting people to sign up.

• Changed the bitrate of our ETS Presets. Using the “auto” setting rather than a fixed, and quite high, bitrate results in much smaller file sizes with no noticeable change in quality.

• Changed the bucket names we’re using. We’re including random characters in the name to reduce the chance of a conflict.

• Reduced the length of the folder name in which we’re storing output videos. This appears in the URL so the shorter the better.

• Made the video.js player responsive.

• Started using Amazon SES instead of Sendmail to send out emails from the service.

• Added SD and HD versions of the video page.

• Made some small changes to the workflow that should hopefully help people when they first sign up. We know that there’s plenty more we can do here but we’re trying to strike a balance between something that’s too basic and something flashy that takes us a long time to implement.

• Started documenting some of the features and limitation of the service, and coming up with questions we’d like to ask some early users.

GFR and Office Admin

• We had an initial go at organising our shared files in Google Drive, having recently moved (almost everything) from Dropbox to Google Drive. We’ve definitely improved the situation but we know there’s more we can do here.

• We set-up 2FA on our joint Go Free Range Dropbox account having got slightly worried about the supposed hacking of Dropbox.

• James configured SPF for gofreerange.com. Apparently it looks as though we’d tried to set it up in the past but hadn’t got the configuration quite right.

• We’ve started the exciting process of dealing with our annual accounts. Our accountant actually does the hard work but we still need to be involved to make sure we’ve got all the information they need.

• We continued to speak to people about finding some new client work. We don’t have anything concrete but we’ve certainly heard some encouraging things.

• We started to discuss our options for office space in 2015. Our lease is up in January so we don’t have too long to try to get something sorted.

• We continued discussing how we might increase the number of people in GFR. We’ve chosen to focus our efforts on how we might have people join with all the rights and responsibilities that James and I share. I found it particularly useful to start documenting what these rights and responsbilities are. I think we have a pretty good shared idea of them but it’s great to have them written down.

Social

• James and Tom T attended LRUG on Monday. They both talked about enjoying the Sonic Pi presentation in particular.

• We hosted the London Computation Club meeting on Tuesday evening. Take a look at Chris Lowis’s writeup if you want to catch up on what we covered.

• Tom Close, James A, Tom W, Tom T, Mike and Hookline all made appearances in the office throughout the week. We certainly enjoy having a variety of people in the office.

• Pete H popped by for a chat after a nearby meeting on Tuesday. We haven’t seen Pete for a while so it was good to catch up.

• We finished the week with a couple of beers at The Old King’s Head.

Have good weeks y’all.

– Chris