Jacob Dalton Log

Thur November 28, 2012

Awoke refreshed. New person on the couch in Hablab - Colby. No scrum and uncordinated Hablab team. Beautiful day. Colby seems to have helped cool things down. Intermittent programming during the day led to intermittent but steady progress. Bad circulation + cold hablab has to be delt with. Need some thin gloves with the finger tips cutout. Glass desktop is also suboptimal given the hablab temp. Kavitha made dinner, and talked with Colby and Parker extensively about company structure which seemed really helpful and enlightening. Would like to download Colby's brain... Able to pop back in and solve a couple issues before sleep. Message sending interface is nearly finished and my head's clear. Gonna smooth out a couple usability inconveniences tomorrow (facebook only logs in once!), and then pivot to remote usability testing. Maybe I can snag a Factor E Farmer for a quick hallway usability test or 2 tomorrow. Right now I'm about 2 days behind schedule. Since there's no production run this weekend I think I can reclaim one of those days, but I have to be cautious and not work too hard and burnout. Friday goals--code cleanup, message sending usability improvements, and usability interview scripts before dinner. Cook dinner in 1 hour or less, and then plan out remote usability testing as best I can.

Wed November 28, 2012

(Writing in retrospect.) This was my absolute worst day in terms of progress. Suffering from low motivation and constant interruption. Made some progress to finishing submission interface, but unable to concentrate. gChat with Kavitha and and food run cut evening very short (work stopped at around 4pm). Cooking, meeting, and dishes took the rest of the night. Meeting seem to start okay but ended poorly. Extremely glad to see Kavitha. Low motivation. Went to bed early.

Week 2

Tue November 27, 2012

(Writing in retrospect.) Before dinner work made good progress and finished the unified message input interface to a point of satisfacion. After dinner meeting to discuss Collaborative Production Runs went poorly and sent Hablab team into disarray. Night time development period was spent discussing a way to resolve issues. Unable to refocus and return to development.

Mon November 26, 2012

Rose decently early and added to scrum questions (how do we change stuff on website, do we need approval to change stuff, can we earmark True Fans funds, can people make videos for the True Fans app and what is the tone of the videos that they'd like to make...). Created a good plan for coding the facebook interface. Had scrum meeting but wasn't able to ask questions due to infrastructure priorities. Worked outside on insulation apron for about an hour and a half. Then went in to start coding at about 3pm. Designed a quality unified interface for facebook and email (thinking of moving twitter to a different step). 5pm started the dinner process--found a good recipe for spicy peanut noodles and went to Dungy's with Tristan to get extra ingredients. Tristan split the food tab ($30 - $15 each) with me. Egg noodles cook fast and was able to finish cooing by around 7:15. Did the dishes afterwards (bad choice--took way too much time). Started coding again at 9pm. About half done with unified interface. I expect 1 more full day of coding and facebook integration should be mostly complete (although I may forgo posting actions for now as it might be technically challenging to change the meta tags of a wiki page...). Goal is to finish facebook integration tomorrow, write user testing scripts and do 'hallway' testing on Wednesday, and do remote user tests on Thursday. Considering pushing twitter integration to post-release and freezing the features after I get play lists working. I'm concerned that I going to get tied up redesigning various pages that our video landing pages link to. It doesn't seem that responsibility for the content of webpages clearly rests in any one persons hands. This should change.

Sun November 25, 2012

Rest day. Slept in a bit and went to a cafe in Cameron with FeFers. Walked around the farm and tried to gage most important tasks still unfinished. Talked to Parker about True Fans plans. Went on a run for fire wood that ended up being a fiasco and took up a lot of time (but on the bright side was kind of good team building expereince). Wrote up some questions for scrum meeting on Monday.

Sat November 24, 2012

Collaborative Production Run Day 2. Worked on aligning primary and secondary and secondary arms of frame. Problems with documentation lead to retorching the holes. Lots of band saw cutting. Lots of lifting and moving things. Worked on one of the vertical plates in the compression chamber. Swept out half of the workshop.

Fri November 23, 2012

Collaborative Production Run Day 1. Setup welder. Did lots of grinding on hopper and primary arms. Hole punched box alignment pieces. Ran band saw and iron worker. Did some mag drilling. Welded u channel nuts on u-channel.

Thur November 22, 2012

Beautiful day -- tidied up a bit in front of hablab (organized pallets, wood, irrigation hose) and started to grade area for insulation apron. Kavitha made an excellent Thanksgiving dinner. True Fans App: More feedback emails (BTC and another testing volunteer - Emily). Started facebook integration. Made slightly less progress than hoped but preliminary integration is up on test server--need to create an interface now. Need to do some backend work to generate adequate meta tags for facebook actions. I expect facebook integration to take one more day, but I could easily hit a snag on the meta tags so I'd plan a day and a half +/- half a day. Afterwards: 1) scripts/teleprompting, 2) twitter, and 3) playlists.

Wed November 21, 2012

Met with Marcin. Attended team meeting. Toured farm (extra work oppurtunities-insulation apron and light screen). Made dinner (spinach potatoes with rice made by Kavitha). True Fans App: sent some feedback emails (to Chuck and Matt). Usability improvements -- upload page no longer has optional inputs visible by default, it's impossible to double submit the form, and changed viewing location of status messages on upload page. Plan to work on facebook integration tomorrow.

Tues November 20, 2012

Arrived at FeF. No issues driving. Set up room and ready to go. Meeting tomorrow with Marcin.

DPV Work Schedule

Cook MWF.

Pre-Arrival: Polished prototype and blog draft (November 16th).

Week 1: Meeting, test the prototype with the team at FeF, bug-fixes, and collect feedback.

Success metric: x[Blog post], x[strategy meeting], first usability tests, and x[usability update 1].

Week 2: Make FeF videos, collect feedback from stakeholders, feature freeze, and update.

Success metric: FeF videos, completed twitter and play list features, email to sample subset of True Fans, and usability update 2.

Week 3: Beta release to a subset of True Fans, prep live server, and update.

Success metric: Remote user testing report and usability update 3.

Week 4: Full release via blog post, analyze, and update.

Success metric: Public release, initial analysis, and usability update 4.

True Fans Mircofunding App

See also Jacob Dalton

See also Jacob Dalton Contract.