Weekly 'ship #1

A weekly update on all things Flagrant

Hello! This is the 1st edition of the “Weekly ‘ship”, a summary of what happened in our sphere last week, and a preview of what may come.

What we did

Yossef Mendelssohn shared an alternative to “moving fast and breaking things” in his post Moving and Working.
A Tiger Team staffed on a Florida-based client prepared a 90-minute, client workshop to kickoff our first quarter’s worth of work in 2023 with the goal to:
- Narrate our efforts through Q4 of last year
- Summarize our learnings in discovery so far
- Name the problems we want to solve this quarter
- Describe our approach
- Share possible experiences
- Provide an opportunity for those participating to ask questions
- Review our check-in schedule
- Jim reminded us not to rule yourself out of doing things because you’re not the best person in the room at doing it, in his post Everybody is a Drawer.
As a team we started the interview process for a candidate in a Business Development Specialist role.
Added Max Cerrina to the MyMomentum project to incorporate a large customer specific feature.
Chris Wilson ran into a large application frontend for a customer written in React that didn’t have any tests. Our interaction to date has been largely with the API written in Ruby and some Devops tasks. He started a conversation within the customer’s development team about whether or not tests should exist and the approach to take if it is decided they are recommended.
Jim practice-interviewed four LEARN Academy students who are 2/3rds of the way through their bootcamp. This was these students’ first time participating in developer interviews. They were asked to speak about their background and the decision to become software engineers, where they see themselves in five years, as well as some technical questions to which an entry-level developer should know the answer.
We welcomed Amy as a part-time copywriter to the team. With a degree in Biology, diplomas in Forensic Identification and Creative Writing, certification in personal training and currently pursuing one in nutrition, Amy’s wide spread of interests will come in handy when she’s working with us to word all the work that our diverse and story-full team does.
Said goodbye and wished a fond farewell to Gina Valdez. Gina is moving on to a position that includes time in an in-person office setting which is important to her. Her new team is incredibly lucky to have her.

What we’re reading

The Expanding Dark Forest and Generative AI

What we’re listening to

What we’re interested in

You Got This Broadcasting Service. A free, remote-friendly, skill-building conference in Toronto!
PostgreSQL: Documentation: 15: 3.5. Window Functions
Oddities & Curiosities Expo
James Webb Space Telescope confirms its first exoplanet
The Atkinson Hyperlegible Font from Braille Institute

What we’re buying

In case you are looking for good incense: Earth & Anchor Soap Co. is where Kelly gets most of her stuff from. Good quality.

What we’re celebrating

Cody for dealing with an annoying bug that was likely caused by a poorly maintained gem not keeping up with latest Ruby versions. After a failed attempt of using a different library he bit the bullet and wrote a Twillio client replacement to save the day. Nice work!
The Tiger team (Amanda, Andrew, Gina, Glynnis, JB, & Jonathan) put together a great kickoff meeting for the next phase of our work on the GTO project. It was a lot of work that required creativity and finesse, and it was ready on schedule (although the schedule then shifted due to conflicts!). Definitely setting us up for success in the next quarter.
Working together to discuss and make so many last-minute changes to our kickoff presentation!
Kudos to Kelly. For slogging through things solo. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s lonely.