In the corner of the Internet that I inhabit there's been a growing movement of agencies and startups writing what are known as weeknotes. They're basically a weekly update on what the company or individual has been up to. It provides an interesting window on the sorts of work that people undertake, along with exposure of the trials and tribulations of running a business.

I think both of those outcomes are useful, and I'm also going to use it as a way of providing more regular updates on the client work and products and projects that MCQN Ltd. undertakes. It's been a very busy year, which is part of the reason why this blog has been so quiet - updating it has been a lower priority than the actual work of running the business. My aim with weeknotes is to provide more frequent, smaller updates, so there's time to fit them in; and maybe I'll find time over the coming months to look back and fill in some of the more interesting things that we got up to over 2009.

The idea has even spawned an aggregator dedicated to following the people writing weeknotes at weeknotes.com.

With that preamble over, what has happened this week?

The start of the week saw the closing out of the current phase of a big client project. Chasing down the final anomalies with various versions of Internet Explorer is never fun, but it's satisfying to see the app solid on all browsers. It's been an interesting project, working out how to grapple with huge volumes of data - the client are surveyors who can be installing dozens of sensors of different types onto a site, all feeding back data via mobile phone networks as often as every couple of seconds. We've been building an app to take all that data and present it to their clients or alert them when it's nearing boundary conditions. We'll be returning to it to add more features in the future, but it's nice to draw a line under the functionality completed so far and see it out in the wild being used.

The rest of the week has been a bit more fragmented, but with some interesting goings-on never the less. I got a quote submitted for a set-top box project, and on Friday met up with a collection of other local startups and agencies for lunch. Met some new faces and caught up with some old - it's been a while since we last did it, and we should try to do it more often.

On the internal projects front, I had a couple of meetings about Bubblino. At present the only way to get one is for me to hand-make one for you, which is nearer to an artist's commission than a product, in both price and manufacturing techniques. I'm exploring what's involved in taking it to product, so that more people can get to enjoy the bubbling and also (in the same way as BERG with the Availabot) to learn more about the process of building physical products.

Finally, I've built and released a trivial little app, the Week Note Calculator. One of the conventions of weeknotes is that you number the weeks from when the business started (although Russell is, as usual, adding an interesting twist to the concept). Which is why this is week 229 - although I'd been working as a sole trader since 2002, MCQN Ltd. was incorporated on 30th September 2005. Rather than break out the calendar, I thought it would be easier to write a little script to work it out for me, and then figured I might as well stick it up on the web for anyone else to use.