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Weekly Changelog @ Pixeesoft

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Welcome

Hello and welcome to our Weekly Changelog mapping out everything that happened last week. Here we summarize everything and link all useful content that you might have missed.

This week is a very eventful one in contrast to the one before - review, planning and a standup! Well then, let’s start!

Monday

Some days are plain old meeting and admin days - boring mundane tasks. But they have to be done. Some meetings are better than others - some build relationships, others are just a waste of time. Today’s was one of the more exciting ones - a future customer relationship. They have an exciting project and need our help along the way. Looks promising - stay tuned! 🎧

From the most boring pile of chores - we had to file all our Q1 accounting for VAT. Talk about booooring. But then again - somebody has to do it, right? It won’t get done by itself and if you’re a startup, you have to do a lot of work by yourself, until you can hire people to help you out.

Last but not least - preparations for Sprint 3 are underway. Some spring repository cleaning after a sprint of changes had to be done - mainly missing documentation, missing comments and mistakenly committed prints.

Next day is a filming day, so we’re getting ready for that - putting together notes from the previous sprint into a nice concise script, looking ahead for the next Sprint planning etc. Plus on top of that - new surprise - a first tutorial is coming! We’ll learn from the best and do a batch produce for more content so that we can save up some time building and tearing down the set.

Sprint Review

We closed another chapter - our second sprint and so we have to sit down and reflect on what worked well and what didn’t. The standard good and bad, improvements from last time etc. Definitely worth checking out!

Post is here, video below:

Wednesday

As I spent loads of time on Tuesday, filming the two videos (planning + review), I got to releasing the planning later in the day. Even though I managed to pre-cut the planning as well, it just didn’t feel right to release the planning the day after. From a YouTube schedule point of you - there are people that just do daily and…respect for that. But in our case, that just doesn’t make sense - we need some time and pacing. So I opted for releasing on Thursday instead, so that I can focus on the daily rhythm and do some admin as well.

I also cleared my e-mail inbox. Did you? 😜

Sprint Planning

Something ends so that something else can begin. And thus began our next sprint - third - and it was necessary to have the standard ritual of sprint planning.

Post is here, video below:

In short - main focus this time are the most crucial microservices written in Python.

Standup 1

The first standup was actually a standup and “a half” - as we inserted an extra day between the releases of the videos, we ended up with an extra day. And because there is no time to linger, we got to work!

Earlier in the week I had a call with a former colleague who worked on the Python component. He has a YouTube channel as well, so if you want to check it out, go show him some love by clicking here. He helped me A LOT in understanding the ins and outs of the components and how the project is structured.

There is a lot of manual work in his code - it’s written in the time, when deployment was done via Apache Web Server, writing init.d scripts and securing processes by writing pid files in your deployment scripts. These things have obviously moved forward by a mile, so there will be a lot of code removal. But now at least I udnerstand it better so I know which bits to keep and which to delete.

There are some questions with regards to deployment - how to go about health checks etc…that will be yet another juicy challenge to solve, I guess.

Conclusion

That’s it for the weekly changelog, thank you for being here with us on this incredible journey. Don’t forget to subscribe on YouTube, follow us on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn. And keep an eye out on our open-source endeavors on GitHub as well!

See you out there! 👋