10th Oct 2022
Last updated
Last updated
As I mentioned last week I am trying to be more proactive to incoming work than reactive. The main reason for this is I don't feel like being reactive always gets me working on the most valuable piece of work. I find being reactive results coming up with short term solutions to solve the immediate problem rather than looking longer term into the future for more sustainable solutions.
Before I can start being more proactive I wanted to clearly map out what projects I have already committed to. to do that. As you can see I have quite a lot of projects 'in progress'. This basically results in me being slower to complete projects because I am juggling so many things at once. I would rather reduce the number of things I have 'in progress' at once so that I can complete projects quicker and more effectively.
I will always make sure there is enough space in my process for unavoidable reactive work like making changes to the website or solving pressing problems so don't hesitate to ask for my time!
The idea behind launchpad is that we want to be able to create a paper-based resource such as our core board but make it available in a variety of colours, fonts, languages, sizes, symbol sets. Right now, we do this by manually creating a board to cover each case which is time consuming. We wanted a system that would allow us to manage all the paper-based resources more efficiently.
We recently got permission from Widgit and PCS to use their symbols within our new system, thanks to Tina! We are still finalising how best to go live with launchpad. We hope to have it live by Christmas (with some nice christmas resources)
We have three resources in the new system if you want to give them a try, there are more to come:
I am involved in a few communities of other Software Developers within the AAC space. These are usually very interesting to see what other groups are working on.
This week a team of Computer Scientists in Dublin joined OpenAAC community. They are working on creating a synthesised voice for the Irish language, and are trying to make it as widely available as possible. I reached out to speak to them more about their work as we are often faced with the limited voices problem so hopefully we can work together or share ideas about how we can make a variety of voices more widely available.
We have recently been trying to integrate a new Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system into our workflows. The goal of this system is for us to manage our communication with customers of our various services in one place.
This week Ryan and I made good progress laying the foundations of the CRM to make sure that we can store data the way we want to. We spent a lot of time carefully mapping out how we want the CRM to work and how we plan on storing data, its much easier for us to make changes now whilst there is no data in the system. We have taken those designs and plans and started putting them into place, although there is still plenty more left for us to do.