Late August, given heavy rain and sun
For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.
At first, just one, a glossy purple clot
Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.
You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet
Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it *
Well Ollie was our blackberry. He came here for a good few months, to ripen. Only to be picked by another organisation once he was sweet. Okay, that was lame, but the sentiment remains. Ollie joined us in February as an intern. Coming from a sales background and in the construction industry he smartly wanted to expand his skills so he could be a better salesman in the IT industry. He has spent time coding with us, dealing with clients, helping with sales calls and generally being a great addition to the office. The end goal was for a permanent position working in sales in an IT company, and he acheived that in record time. Fair play Ollie, and best of luck in your future ventures.
I started work this week on a new website for MVI Hazel. This is the second site for the Gardiner Group and is built on Umbraco with some integration with an Avenco eCommerce application.
Starting a new project can be accompanied by a lot of unexpected setup steps. The first deployment to a staging/live server always eats into the day, and it's something we will always allow time for in our project plans. We use Final Builder for automated deployment scripting, so once our deployment process is stable, it can be run easily over and over again. A great tool and a must have for all dev houses.
On Thursday, Martin attended the third and final Open Government Partnership Ireland public meeting. This forum resulted from Martin's work with ActiveCitizen, bringing this international initiative to the Government's attention and lobbying for Ireland to join. At the meeting, Martin joined the Transparency Working Group, where proposals included the provision of machine readable open data; transparent budgeting; FOI revision and abolition of fees; the publication of legislative footprints and consolidated legislation; and many other worthwhile policy suggestions. Other groups worked on Accountability, Citizen Participation and Technology & Innovation and all suggestions can be found on the Working Groups section of the OGP Ireland website. These proposals will be compiled into a report which will contribute to Ireland's first OGP policy Action Plan next April.
Ivan Cooper from The Wheel facilitated the Citizen Participation Working Group at the OGP Meeting in Wood Quay
Tomás was working with LABrokers this week. He has been make adjustments to the rule engine used for calculating quotes for end users. We have been working with LABrokers for a long time, and continue to enhance their systems so they can continue to offer a high quality service to their customers.
Ollie spent much of his week implementing SMS voucher purchases for GiftVoucherSolutions, who provide instant gift vouchers for businesses all over the UK, Ireland and even South Africa. We use generally use eSendex as an SMS provider, integration is quick and easy.
* An extract from 'Blackberry-Picking' by Seamus Heaney. I clearly take much inspiration from Seamus Heaney who famously said, "Write whatever you like!" Have a good weekend!