Changelog, Sunday 18th August 2024

New site, Appraisal refresh, and Tract weekend away.

I remember Lachy Groom once telling me that, at Stripe, they would always push to get the implem to match the designs perfectly the first time. I now understand why: you get it extremely close first time, and there isn't the long tail of tweaks and edits that can drag a project on. Not always possible when you don't have a full-time design team; we sometimes have to make design changes on-the-fly. But nothing we shouln't work hard to emulate, if only because Stripe do it.

We are now very close to launching the new site. Next week we'll get the bulk of the content in place, and then we'll get a final pass from our fabulous designers, And–Now.

We've also started refreshing the user flows and application UI for our Appraise product. We started putting things in Storybook, but Elliot pointed out that it was quite a bit more work for no real audience. So we stripped it out and built a local test page instead. Here's a sneak preview:

The classification worker is busy chugging away, but it's running slower than we had anticipated. We might need to up our GPU spend to get the speeds we want, but we're also noticing quite a few retries.

Finally, this week featured our first-ever team weekend away in Cumbria, in the lovely village of Cartmel. We ate some delicious food, drank lots of beers, and Henry went for a walk up Scafell Pike to enjoy the views:

The first, we hope, of many more.