Year’s April Checkpoint Report: what’s that and what’s new?
About five years ago, I started to collect little and big projects, like Formula – Universal Code Editor and Web-as-a-Service (WaaS), in this journey lot had happen, priorities had change, incomes and the office has shifted, no agile process, employees hiring and firing. That experience made who I am today, and no regrets. All of this happened in a place where I had to challenge myself in ways unknown, without help, financial support and with no knowledge on how to do it. That’s not the case anymore.
After passing for extremely challenging and difficult times, now I have a little bit more stability, my knowledge base has grown. I feel like I have been hired to my own company with a clear and super powerful mind to start fresh, organize and move forward to the next quest. In the end of the last year, my company was a mess (a reflex of myself).
The move, the quest, the checkpoint
To make my move to the ways unknown again, to make big moves, I had to organize me and the company, applying agile process, renewing contracts, implementing best practices, and much more. This year, till December, that’s the plan! From there to April we will use to solid growth. This is a series of posts to show what have been done. I will challenge myself to post every month this checkpoint!
This checkpoint reflects all the work from the previous months since January First.
Communications
Moving to Telegram: due to privacy and security reasons, I started implement a shift on the way vtnorton company communicate with our partners and the community. Moving from WhatsApp to Telegram make it possible to grow a more intimate relationship and experience.
This website: I also had worked pretty hard on creating this channel last year, but some work had left to be done. This year I updated with more accessibility, improved topography (after my extensive course of typography for web I had to put it on practice), more improvements on the esthetic experience for big and small screens and general changes like, but not limited to:
- Now it’s showing all kind of posts on the homepage;
- Fixed several broken links;
- Updated tags and category for every post;
- Fixed several TYPOs in English and Portuguese;
- A search engine was added to the site;
- The menu and the header was remade by the ground up to a more elegant look;
- Improved the look for bigger screens.
The portfolio: sure, this website is a big and incredible portfolio, but I choose to use the @vtn_showcase Instagram to share, in a more intimate and familiar way, the work from vtnorton. The idea here is to consolidate all the projects in one place only, the estimation is to finish this work by the end of the year, so stay tuned!
Formula – Universal Code Editor
Formula Beta Testers: this amazing group is now on Telegram – join them here! After more than two years almost with no interaction I started to send new bits and collect feedback from this group again. Also moved it to telegram like the previously statement.
The old code is becoming new: some five years code, no dependency injection, no tests, no agile is getting a refresh look, please look at the series of building Formula to know what’s have being done in details. I started to implement gif flow, unit tests and much more. The plans for how it will be test with the Beta Group is getting better. And more DevOps! Let’s move from an amateur code to a professional, stable and reliable source code using Kanban process.
Uncoupling Formula: (I will share a more technical view later this month), after changing the core code from Formula and I broke the app in three different serverless apps and made it open sourced. More actions like this is in a really close roadmap.
A seamless update: after reviewing the app in production and changing the site last year a lot of the links inside the app was broke, I fixed that.
Heartthrob
Update across different services: one of my biggest projects is the heartthrob framework, released last year, have now a more reliable service to update itself and all the services and websites using it. It can take up to 10 minutes to update every service. This way it ensures the consistency of the design and accessibility everywhere
Internal governance
Products backlogs: with more than 30 ideas and projects to build and release every company in any size can go crazy! After big meetings and much thought on the key points of the vtnorton vision for this year I could prioritize the work, but more than that, create a roadmap for every product and, because of that, we know exactly what I need to do. So, hands at work!
Productivity tools (O365): after years of only consulting and writing stuff up on a place that did not change or got reorganized with all that changes one the company, now it got a makeover. Tools like Planner, Todo, OneDrive and OneNote can make the productivity way better! Especially because it can work great with multi users across company and guests.
Security and privacy improvements: all the passwords have changed, for every client, for every service. I also have disabled many third-party services that could compromise the privacy of the clients (especially for WaaS) and users. I’m taking a close look to the security and privacy, more to share soon.
Debts payments: last but not least, all the debts had been paid for our third parties and compromises. I can now evaluate new areas and new projects.
Thank you so much for reading this, stay tuned as more news are coming.