Weekly Check-In (2021 Week 4 - All welcome!)

Hi everyone. Here's my first weekly update. Thanks for having me!

[Last Week]

• Pretty much completed our milestone, just wrapping it up over the next day. The focus of this milestone was building self-service functionality for parents (ie. guardians of students), in preparation for a public launch.
• Launched!

[This Week]

• Start our new milestone. It's essentially a feature freeze so we can pause, evaluate recent functionality, fix bugs, and work some spit and polish. With that said, we may try to squeeze in some more automation features, if we have the bandwidth.

Sidenote: we refer to each development cycle as a milestone, and align it to an outcome. I refuse to call these cycles 'sprints' because Agile (enough said). On the plus side, this keeps us focused, and it means that every 2-3 weeks (a milestone takes as long as it takes -- there are no arbitrary deadlines), I'll post a new milestone update on our product page.

[Goal for Month]

Be as prepared as possible for the B2C category (or at least 80% done). This will give us peace of mind that our service is functional and reliable, which will allow us to divert some attention to the B2B category. But one step at a time. Rome wasn't built in a day. Your mileage may vary. I am not a lawyer.

[Description]

Hello World is an educational institute based in Sydney, Australia. Our mission is to break down barriers to tech ed so that anyone can learn how to code — and have fun along the way.

First full week of the new job last week. A bit slow as I was ramping up, but it felt great to be part of an exciting company where I can make a meaningful contribution. My motivation and energy level has been super high, so I put in some good hours on a side contract and also really tackled some things in Announcr I've been wanting to do.

Nice also to see that I set the bar pretty low for myself each week in terms of things, but usually end up doing more.

I'm copy/pasting the goals from last week to reflect planned vs actual.
[Last Week]

• Create the Arrived staggered time trigger - DONE
• Create the Exited time trigger - NOT GOING TO DO THIS RELEASE
• Show some kind of user id and location id so people can add each other directly - DONE
• Stretch goal: add a history screen so you can see recent triggers and events and replay an audio payload - DONE

Other major-ish things I was able to mark as Done (list from Clubhouse's Complete column):

• Add app push notifications capability using OneSignal and fixed the iOS build so they work (YAY!)
• Went through my sound library and chose a ton of appropriate sounds to add. Converted, uploaded and added 148 Music and Sounds to Database and App. MASSIVE improvement
• Created delay feature to deliver audio payload but stagger the play of it for X seconds. Super useful for timing things just right.
• Instead of just sending a piece of text as a message payload, created a "Build Announcement Screen" which lets you choose an intro sound, an AWS Polly voice to speak the message in, an outro sound, and a delay timer. Also lets you pick if you would like to receive a mobile app notification. The dropdown menus for the sounds also download/cache the soundFX file and play it so you can hear it
• Created an Active Status toggle button for Locations
• Pull in last 50 items into a History display on location app
• Added a fake "I'm on the way/Enroute" Trigger
• Tore apart and re-implemented the Inside Trigger as it is confusing now. Started on a more streamlined UI so it's easy to understand what to do and when
• Added a "copy to clipboard" functionality to let things like Location and User FIDs be shared easily
• Overhauled trigger cool downs and daily reset display
• Brainstormed how IAP might work

[This Week]

• Streamline the UI a bit more to make it easier for beginners to use. Considering an "Advanced" view vs Standard view
• Create help pages
• Make final decision on how/which features to include for a smooth transition to IAP functionality for monetization
• Release? Gonna be tight

[Goal for Month]
Landing page and early signups for "Talking Houses" by Announcr

[Description]
Announcr is a connected speaker and notification platform. Trigger various actions depending on user locations. Play sounds, make API calls, etc. New Landing Page

How did you fare last week?
Fnialized the mvp for my side projects
What's on deck for this week?
Polishing and improving small stuff in the projects
What's your goal for the month?
to get 10 users to start a course on coursenip
[Optional] Brief description of project with link (if applicable)
https://coursenip.com

How did you fare last week?
Had some trouble concentrating (Somehow having riots in town is highly demotivating to stay concentrated, much easier to doomscroll your time away)

Found a solution for the reported vimarun issues.
But also just identified a new issue while testing, so I will keep busy before releasing a new version.

What's on deck for this week?
Get a new vimarun released.
Start working on new features and bug fixes for Vimalin next update.

Goal for the month?
Keep on growing the sales for Vimalin and fix a few issues with vimarun.

Brief description
Vimarun - run VMware Virtual Machines automatically.
Vimalin - automated Virtual Machine backups for VMware Fusion, Workstation and Player.