Where were we?

I last wrote notes around Week 374. My Makefile tells me this is about Week 380. I think that’s correct. If not, well, time has slightly lost some of its meaning in recent weeks, and who’s counting? Week 380 it is.

In week 375, I finally finished my career review, and [wrote that up]. That was a prelude to more formally seeking out new projects and clients. Of course, what then happened was COVID-19 made it quite clear that we were not proceeding as normal for a bit. I left the studio and went to work from home, and started trying to investigate new work from there.

Which was not, at that point, particularly fast-moving, and, coupled with the strangeness of lockdown, everything slowed down a little. It was going to be a challenge to write ongoing weeknotes where I invented euphemisms for “not very busy over here”, so I went a little quiet.

When I write down what I’ve been up to since then, though, it’s a decent amount:

• I made voipcards. This was, initially, one of my one-line-gags turned into a small project. It was also a useful tool to prod at learning a bit more Svelte, to practice building PWAs, and to occupy my mind. It turned out quite popular on the internet, which led to me writing about the problems of solutionising, and why I’m still not sure it’s that good a project.
• I released the 2.0.x firmware for 16n, and wrote about that here. This had been on the shelf for a different project - Mayhill - for a while, and I realised it could easily be ported to 16n. The big feature this introduces is configuring your hardware from the browser, over USBMidi. Really pleased with how this turned out, and the community feedback has been great.
• I built up a personal electronics project over a few days, which turned out rather well after some fettling. Fun things I learned here included using naked board substrate as a transparent surface for LEDs to shine through, how to drive 256 LEDs off only 64 channels (four sixteen-LED drivers chained over I2C), and then tweaking the update rate of the LEDs so they don’t flicker on cameras as well as to the naked eye. (That involved moving the update rate to an integer division of 30 frames a second…)
• been spending some time volunteering on Makerveristy’s PPE effort - primarily, on a tangential project to the 3D printing they’ve been launching, where I’ve been lending some support on digital logistics work as well as comms and lightweight project management.
• pitching a bit and having phone-calls and chats.
• quite a lot of business-related admin.
• setting up two new projects. Let’s called them Bradnor and Easington. I signed the contracts for Bradnor, a short project around infrastructure for an IOT project, last week, and we’re nearly there with Easington.

That felt like enough to finally write about. And now I’m back in the saddle, it should be harder to break the chain next week. As ever: onwards.