IncentiBook: Covid and Coding

Ten days ago my phone buzzed to tell me that I had been near someone who subsequently tested positive for covid-19. Joy. So far through the now three lockdowns, I’ve been fairly relaxed about the whole situation and keeping within the rules. Recently, though, things have been a bit different.

In the last few days , I have felt sick, disorientated, tired and slightly breathless. This really is nothing compared to the experiences of most, but was certainly a wake-up call.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been thinking of the finality of death and the shortness of life. A colleague suggested that it was part of the process of becoming a dad, whereas I think it’s more that four people I know have died in the last year. Having never lost anyone close to me until recently, it really makes it clear that this life wont last forever, and we really do need to cherish each day — as cliche as that sounds.

It is now the busiest time of the academic year where marking exams from last semester and beginning teaching in the new semester, are done hand-in-hand. Who says academics don’t love hard work? This has put a massive slow-down on developing IncentiBook.

For the last two weeks, since moving IncentiBook.com to Digital Ocean from Weebly, I had been unable to get the email contact form to submit to my Ubuntu server. This is something I have done before and drove me absolutely mad not being able to figure out. Turns out I was just being a moron. I went back and copied the code from shortestroute.io and it worked fine. Sometimes, it’s the simple things that confuse us most.

In my last post my planned activities were

• Write ‘How IncentiBook Can Help Your Industry’ posts for relevant industries.
• Persist cold emailing people for interviews.
• Begin including Google Maps API in development.

I have done the first and third, but have slowed on the cold-emailing. My current plan is to call/email and just chat about the product and their experiences. I did do this some time ago and it really was a great experience.

The Google Maps Distance Matrix work is going well. I have hit a minor stumbling block, but that should be resolved before the week is out…he says.

An ambitious goal would be to have a beta version of IncentiBook online before May. I think I’ll work with that.

Goals for next week

• Get distance matrix accepting arrays from php.
• Book five calls with a variety of relevant small business owners.

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