Arthur here, putting in a long-swerved weeknotes shift.
I started last week by immersing myself in KiCad how-tos, curious how our My First PCB course fits in around the alternatives. I was pleased to find a wealth of quality tutorials - in written and video formats - and that this course is the simplest (by my reckoning) introduction to the software going. In open-source spirit, the guide remains publicly available, while giving those that want to support us a way to pay. We have set up a Ko-fi page as a simple starting point, and are open to other suggestions if you have strong feelings on the subject. Feel free to try it out ;)
After I emerged from those nine tutorials, I found myself thinking about and documenting our marketing approach... at the cost of actually making/posting content! But it should be easier to share interesting things now that we have a fairly clear content marketing strategy, simple workflows in place, and a few personas for our customer segments. Is your buzzword-detector going off yet? SEO!
Staying with the meta-work theme, over the last few months we have been trying to get better at prioritising. Since both myself and Adrian are liable to spin three projects out of every tea break, staying on task needs to be built-in to the routine.
We've settled into a weekly monday-morning review, shuffling git issues around in a simple kanban system on github (pictured) and gitlab (not pictured) project boards.
In the review, which can take anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours depending on the nature of the work and how deep we dig into the issues, we check that all the current issues are relevant with clear and assigned next steps. Since it draws our attention back to the priority of getting more MCQN Ltd products on the market, the Mersey Dot is now on the way and neglected products like the PCB jewellery and the Ackers Bell are getting some attention. We haven't figured out how to merge our generally-public github issues with our generally-private gitlab issues, but using both has been simple enough.
Last week Adrian kept the consultancy work moving around client meetings on top of the essential admin of submitting and paying the VAT return. A new project kicked off for FACT - the digital art gallery here in Liverpool. We're going to breathe new life into one of their old installations, and the first stage is a bit of digital archaeology: reverse-engineering the serial protocol it uses. Adrian says "it gave me flashbacks to my time at Microsoft - using Hyperterminal and null-modem cables on a Windows XP box!"
