Weekly Recap #20: Tick, tock, tick, tock, …
It’s Tuesday morning and this is a live ticker. Although it’ll be Saturday when you read this. Confused? Yeah, whatevs, let’s go!
I’m Harry, we’re diesdas.digital and this is our 20th recap. 20th! Holy shit, I am honestly surprised we got this far. Buckle up, we’re going on a ride through the week!
Tuesday, 10:35am
It’s Tuesday morning (Monday was a national holiday in Germany) and this is my second attempt at a slow ticker through the week, instead of writing the full text as a summary afterwards. Last week I completely forgot about the plan, so this week requires a bit of discipline.
We started the day by making a plan for this short week, assigning tasks to people and ended up with a lot of non-project work … such as:
- Proof reading an SLA and negotiating a project contract
- Correcting faulty invoices with the respective companies
- Preparing a talk for a conference
- Chasing two project leads
- Doing some accounting (see below)
All of this has to happen this week, with project work on top. So I’m gonna stop writing now, make a coffee and get started. To be continued …
Tuesday, 2:00pm
We’re back from lunch, Lorenz did most of the contract negotiations already, passing drafts from client to lawyer and back. Lars is out for a meeting with a client. I’m digging into how to style Google AMP pages. Business as usual. 🙃
Also we’re making new stickers. Bigger and better this time.
Tuesday, 4:00pm
For a project I’m getting the chance to dig into Google’s AMP pages, pretty excited about that, as there are valid learnings about performance to be gained. Most of Google’s decisions about what to remove and what to replace in the regular web stack make sense and can be applied to any other web project as well. So yeah, curious to learn more.
Wednesday, 10:40am
Today is meeting day, as we’re all busy with various things. That’s why Lars and I were already in the office at 8am, the others joining at 9am. #yawn. The schedule:
- 9am, all of us: Project planning with our lawyer Jan Kuhlen, dressed all fancy because he had to go to court later on. Like a real working person. Consider us impressed. 😊
- 11am, Lars: Workshop with a client to talk campaign and roll-out strategy, for the rest of the day.
- Noon, Lorenz + Max + Harry: Lunch with a client, wrapping up the first phase of the project and to discuss about how to proceed.
- 2pm, Lorenz + Max + Harry: Call with our tax accountant to optimize our workflows.
- 3pm, Lorenz + Harry: Prepare our talk for the .process conference, for the rest of the day.
Very much looking forward to return to code and working in the zone tomorrow. Meetings are fine, but only if they serve a clear purpose and act as the foundation for continued individual work. Otherwise, pull a Fixler.
Wednesday, 11:50am
Time for the lunch. Which is a meeting. Sigh. At least Lorenz has fun guessing the tunes playing from the restaurants sound system:
Wednesday, 1:30pm
Yup, lunch was productive, great results, all good. Next.
Wednesday, 2:35pm
Just had a call with our accountant, asking lots of financial questions, regarding workflow, working together more efficiently, donations and such. We’ve now gone full circle with our accounting efforts, having tried to handle it ourselves, getting a freelance accountant to do it with us and in the end coming back to what we started with in January: not dealing with it ourselves and outsourcing as much as possible. But good things take time. Sometimes you gotta go all the way to reach a conclusion.
Wednesday, 3:30pm
Lorenz and I drafted our conference talk for .process, that I’m gonna give on May 28 in Dortmund. After one hour of brainstorming and scribbling we had a good outline that I’m gonna build into a slide deck on Friday, hopefully supported by Max’s illustration skills.
Wednesday, 4:54pm
After a lot of talking we’re all pretty exhausted and will most likely call it a day now. Max has some energy left, but I feel like going home to be honest. The meeting with our lawyer in the morning seems like it happened days ago. 😴
Wednesday, 5:07pm
Yup, we’re officially done for today. Lorenz and Max are buying fancy herbs in fancy boxes on fancy Monoqi. I’d say that’s a shameless rip-off from Click & Grow’s set though. Anyhow, time to go home.
Thursday, 11:01am
We had a productive morning so far, writing some code, getting each other up to speed regarding project progress. Lars and Lorenz are leaving in a bit, to catch a train to Ahaus, to attend Shopware Community Day 2016. I’m not kidding. Meanwhile, Max and I are going to meet a client and later today there’ll hopefully be more me-time within Sublime Text.
Thursday, 4:28
Back in the office, I’ve watched Obama’s final White House correspondents’ dinner speech and it’s hilarious. As one commenter appropriately put it: “What a beast!” — in case you’re curious:
Time for some work now. AMP, here I come!
Thursday, 5:24pm
But, as a developer working on a relatively old codebase, of course you don’t just get started. You inspect a cryptic Grunt file first. You stare at some code deciphering what it does and which role it plays in the bigger ensemble. You try to wrap your head around the architecture and why anybody would set it up like that (that anybody being yourself, five years prior). You stumble upon a folder full of stuff you have absolutely no clue about. Anyhow, it looks like setup is done now and I can get to work tomorrow!
(Wasn’t all that bad actually, but you know, devs like to complain. 😗)
Thursday, 5:29pm
Meanwhile Max is preparing a workshop for Monday.
Thursday, 6:15pm
Ending the day with a beer in the Hinterhof. Cheers and see you tomorrow!
Friday, 1:24pm
Cool, it’s Friday. Lots of things happened already: Lars and Lorenz are attending the Shopware Community Day 2016 and Lorenz is hyping it up on Twitter. Meanwhile Max and I went through the .process talk again, had lunch, had coffee at Father Carpenter (see above). Coffee was good, but oh my, so many hipsters and tech people. One guy had a Pivotal Tracker shirt. Wow. But we’re obviously part of that crowd as well, so who are we to complain?
Friday, 2:34pm
Finally done with all emails, time to bust out some slides in Keynote.
Friday, 3:35pm
Tired from a lengthy discussion about font licensing.
Friday, 4:34pm
Lorenz and Lars sending greetings from Shopware Community Day. What the actual fuck?
Friday, 4:39pm
We just realized that you can access all photos from the under water photo booth on Twitter: Is this real life?
Friday, 4:44pm
Scrolling through this recap so far and looking at all the photos I get the impression that we never do any actual work. Rest assured, quite to the contrary. Fun and work aren’t mutually exclusive, ya know?
Friday, 5:04pm
Continuing work on the slide deck, based on these initial sketches. Kinda in the mood to just leave them like this, as scribbles. Friday afternoon taking its toll.
Friday, 6:14pm
Alrighty, I didn’t quite finish the slide deck, but got quite far. Maybe one too many pop culture references in there, but the audience will survive. Above you see me taking a photo of our notes to continue on the weekend. We’re calling it a day now, going home. Have a good Friday evening and a relaxing start of the weekend! I’ll do the final touches on this post tomorrow morning.
Saturday, 10:04am
Morning! Lorenz just sent me a little review of the Shopware shenanigans:
Lars and I attended the Shopware Community Day 2016. Shopware is an ecommerce system designed and built in Schöppingen, Germany, near the dutch border. It is quite impressive to see how much the company has grown and gained popularity. Yesterday they also introduced their new client HBO. Apart from interesting presentations and a good keynote from their CTO Stefan Hamann who introduced their efforts for 2016 it was great to see how much they care about their community. The conference tickets were really not expensive and we got unlimited food and drinks, it was crazy. The location in Ahaus at Tobit software is also worth a visit, especially because of the beach party part after the presentations. The one presentation that really stood out from the others was the talk from Philip Siefer, the CEU (Chief Executive Unicorn) of einhorn, a condom startup. They put so much story and care into their products and never take themselves seriously, they are a great inspiration for their industry. We will definitely attend the Shopware Community day next year.
Cool, sounds good. Maybe I gotta join them next year.
Saturday, 12:16am
And with that I’m gonna end this little blogging experiment. It’s definitely been more exhausting to constantly add things to this post each day, which might be the reason why I was rather quiet on all other channels. Next week we’ll go back to regular summary-style posts.
Until then … have fun and catch some sun. My girlfriend and I took a stroll through Tiergarten this morning and it was super calm and relaxing … so if you’re in Berlin, there’s your plan for tomorrow morning. 😉
See you next week and if you have any thoughts, send them our way! We appreciate every bit of feedback, be it a tweet, an email or just that little green heart. 💚 Harry out!
