Week 741

I’ve been observing several companies and people whom I respect keeping a weekly log of what they’re up to–a phenomenon now called “Weeknotes“–for a while now and, after realizing how valuable the practice could be in giving me a real sense of perspective over time, decided to jump on the bandwagon.

To my estimation, Newfangled, which was founded by Eric Holter in November of 1995, has existed for 741 weeks. So, my Weeknotes will begin with Week 741…

On Mondays, we start the week out with an internal resourcing meeting where our project management teams get together in the same room and look over all their active projects to see where they stand with deadlines and budgets. It’s a great thing to come out from behind our technology and do this as a group; each person has the opportunity to be exposed to the work that others are doing. It makes a difference. Meanwhile, every Monday morning, Mark and I have a conference call with Eric to check in on big-picture company stuff (finances, long-term planning, etc.).

Tuesday, I published our latest newsletter. This one was the first of a two-part article on the web development process as we know it. Boy, did it turn out longer than I thought it would! But hey, the images were fun (an homage to The Way Things Work, by David Macaulay). Mark and I also met with our engineering team to check in on how the upcoming update to our advanced measurment dashboard is coming along. It’s looking good! Then, that afternoon, Mark and I met with two local entrepreneurs to give them some feedback on a web application they are building a business around.

On Thursday afternoons you’ll find me in a meeting with our project management teams where we spend a bit of time talking about how to do our jobs better. This week, we spent the entire session talking about our quality assurance processes. Everyone had the chance to offer feedback and make suggestions as to how we can improve.

Other Stuff: Mark has been drafting an outline and some writing samples for a book on what we do. It looks like he’s got a likely publisher, which, aside from being exciting, will be key to keeping him working steadily toward completing the thing. I’ve been talking to another design publication about writing some articles on web technology and am looking forward to the publication of my first piece for Smashing Magazine exploring my holistic browsing technology idea. One of Brian’s screencasts was tweeted by his e-mentor and analytics guru, Avinash Kaushick. Also, I tried out the Aardvark search engine for the first time on Friday. Have you tried it?