Starting with the week after Easter, I’m now working as a full-time self-employed. And to comply with weeknote custom, I renumbered my weeknotes so the one from last week now is #1. All previous weeknotes, written during the business launch preparation phase, got negative numbers. The advantage of this change is that if (rather when) I have to compute the current weeknote number, I can use the Weeknote Calculator.
My application for state founding subsidies has been accepted! Yay! I’ll be granted nine months of unemployment pay with 300 € on top, no strings attached. That means I can develop my business in a sane pace without worrying about my family starving.
The new Freistil Campus website is working great. I’m very happy to have moved from Moodle to Drupal because I can do so much more with the site now. As I’ve told before, we’re already using it for the new Perl Meisterkurs that started this month, and it’s so much fun to experience motivated participants that fill the seminar group with postings and literally beg for new course material so they can continue learning.
I’ll start working on a bunch of new training projects this week, including some free webinars about development topics like version control. My main focus will be two big online workshops I’ll call “Water” and “Ice” for now.
Work on our hosting system is going fine, all the base infrastructure is in place. Especially the monitoring and security systems have already proven to work great. The former by waking me up in the early morning to tell me I had forgotten to configure the resource allocation of one web server which then gradually ate up all memory and went down in flames. The latter by alerting me of of a mysterious change of a system program that, as I found out an hour of anxiety later, had been caused by a software update I had done the previous day.
I’m not happy to report that I still haven’t finished work on the hosting product website. But since everything else is running in its tracks I’m optimistic that next week will be launch week. (He said, in his child-like naïveté…)