Welcome to Update 4! We’re a little shorthanded as we get ready to enter Thanksgiving break – so there isn’t as much to talk about. You also might notice this website looks a little different. We’ll get to that in a moment.
Build
After dealing with an air leak for a somewhat longer-than-expected time, we’ve maybe fixed it! There’s a test bench with pneumatics that we’ve been trying to fix, so finally fixing a major air leak is progress. It’s something to do with the compressor and the tubing involved.
I’m not quite sure what’s happening with Gerald the robot, but I’ve been assured that progress is being made.
We’re also continuing work on the chariots. Some of us have been cutting parts for the chariots, and it’s probably clear that the chariots are indeed charioting. We’ve also busted two screws in the process, but it’s all part of the process.
We’re also trying to figure out why some of our 3D-printed parts aren’t coming out quite right. So far, they’re performing some routine maintenance. It’s a little old, but we’re hoping it can still get us through the season.
Programming
Today, they may or may not have tinkered with the code a little too much. At this current point in time, they’re just trying to figure out why the compressor on the test bench isn’t working.
Update: they’ve fixed the issue!
Business
The rest of the business group is making a tier list about numbers. So, now I can finally talk about the website. (Yes, the author of this post has recently joined the team and also manages the website.)
When I joined the team, the website was really slow to load. According to Google’s PageSpeed test, it would’ve taken a person on a phone 11 seconds to completely load our pages. That’s completely unacceptable for a group that’s supposed to be putting technology at the forefront of our world. The website was being bogged down by years of duplicate files, uncompressed Javascript, unoptimised themes that admittedly looked cool but ran poorly, and some partially initiated attempts to help fix some of these issues. We fixed that.
Until recently, we weren’t showing up on Google. After putting some effort into making sure everything looked ready to go, we finally submitted our sitemaps to the crawlers at Google for the first time since this website started in 2017. Also, users on mobile devices had everything off-centered and it all looked weird. Additionally, some bits stuck out and caused you to scroll away from the text you wanted to read. It looked ugly. And it was. So, we fixed it.
This change has been a long time coming. It took a month of debate and preparation. It took some convincing. And it took some brand new people behind this. The website rebrand is finally complete… sort of. You’ll notice the colours look a little bland. That’s not what we’re keeping forever – we’ll be tweaking the colours to help brand ourselves as the Wire Clippers again.
We’ll be rebranding with a new logo very soon. So far, this side project is kept somewhat under wraps. And, to be clear, nothing is going away! Every single post we’ve ever made is staying exactly where it is. You’ll just see a new look behind it all.
We’re also adding Cloudflare into the mix. Cloudflare offers us spam protection, DDoS protection, and a bunch of other cool things that we can play with. While we’re awaiting our website hosting manager swapping our nameservers to Cloudflare, you might see a significant amount of downtime (from experience, we’re expecting 4-6 hours of downtime). That’s completely normal, but we apologise for the inconvenience in advance.
Closing Notes
We’re not exactly doing much this week, but we’re very much busy. Enjoy your Thanksgiving break!
Teammates – expect some wicked hard work when we come back.
