Welcome to Update 2 of our continuing series of following the Wire Clippers. It’s like keeping up with the Kardashians but without the toxicity. It’s been a while since we’ve last posted, and by that, we mean… about two weeks. We were busy with midterms/finals, but I’ve been told we’re working on chariots again.
Programming
Programming first today! The codebase has been cluttered, neglected, and boiler-plated, so they’re taking care of it with some system updates and quite a bit of going through old code. None of us on the Business side know quite what’s happening, but if you’d like to keep up with them, visit our GitHub to keep up on the latest commits before the season.
Gerald, our vacuum bot, is being built quickly (or being… vacuumed?) Out of the multiple ideas submitted by members of the team (including, but not limited to Will, Toby Jr, and The Great Maw), we finally chose a name. We’re also figuring out how to get the vacuum mounted on the robot. So far, ’tis not going as expected. However, ’tis expected to be finished sometime soon.
Build
The build team has been busy building some new chariots using some plywood. They’ve been drilling wood and cutting plywood all evening. Check out these photos that demonstrate that, while we’re great at building, we also really suck at organising. (Yes, the wood pile is still there.)
Business
On the business side, we worked on trying to cobble together our funding for this year, alongside doing some significant reworking of our social media operations. I’m currently (or should be currently) editing the first video of a new initiative we’re attempting to do to increase audience engagement. I’m also very busy writing updates like these, but the team as a whole is doing something radically different. We’re building relations with new companies and maintaining our existing relations with previous sponsors to get the funding necessary to survive the season. They’re great, but we’re always looking for funding and sponsorships if you’re looking to help some dedicated and driven students here at the Wire Clippers.
Quick note: appearance changes throughout the website should be expected to roll out throughout the month. These include updating outdated mentor photos, adding our current team’s yearbook photo to the website, and a few other finishing touches before we roll out a major upgrade to the interface that should optimise our website to be faster than ever. Stay tuned!
I’m taking over the website for now while we get everything related to the website updated before the big switch, which will take some time. We’ve also been trying to figure out how to optimise the website to help with resource consumption in the meantime. We’re only on update 2 of the year, so we still have quite a bit of catching up to do. In the meantime, thanks for your patience.
Closing Notes
We’ve become very busy helping each other find the trail before our competition season. It’s been a great week, and we’re ready to do it again next week! (Hopefully, we can be done with the chariots.)
