NOVEMBER 2015
Salutations everyone.
Today we're publishing the first of what we hope will be many monthly status reports in order to better engage the general public with respect to what we're accomplishing on a regular basis, as well as to offer some insight into our operations, the challenges we're facing, and what we're doing to overcome those obstacles.
What We've Done, and What We're Doing
Fadela: We're slowly preparing for the launch of version 0.2.0, in which we plan to go completely open source. Our biggest hurdle has been a comprehensive demonstration of the state of the art with respect to the project's functionality. Naturally, that's exposing plenty of issues we overlooked in development. And we're polishing those up too.
NYC: We've investigated and continue to investigate free data sources for us to better analyze stocks and businesses.
Digital Media Miner: We're not quite sure how we want to present this project. So, we're just continuing to make minor tweaks here and there to appearance, code organization, interface, and what not.
Semaforo: Our latest internal project, Semaforo, has emerged from a set of scripts dedicated to better organizing our operations. Functions include micromanaging the prioritization of tasks and task categories, analyzing timing and complexity of the tasks we do to help gauge productivity, dictating the load allocation of goals in a given time period, parsing and processing our to-do list, and providing a top-down view of everything that's going on (complete with a homecooked kanban frontend).
We're exploring the prospect of implementing unified “Lockett frameworks” in languages such as PHP, JS, and Ruby, to enhance reusability and thus productivity, and reduce boilerplate code. We're also polishing up and verifying the more mission-critical components of the Semaforo system for production use.
Challenges and Solutions
With respect to organization of the massive amount of tasks at hand, we can always be better organized. Optimizing prioritization of tasks has proven to be a tremendous challenge, as it is imperative that we effectively track resources allocated within a given time frame in order to facilitate future project time and cost estimates.
We're also doing far more studying than cold hard development, so while we're gaining more conceptual understanding of self-organization, practical skills development is moving at a slower pace.
Aware of these shortcomings, we're learning as much as we can to combat them so that we're not entirely confined to reliance on the trial-and-error nature of our iterations. Nevertheless, we're learning what we can from iterations to better understand ourselves as an organization.
Not to let studies consume all our time, we're upping development task allocations, and exploring how to best prioritize and organize the most pressing development-oriented tasks.