It feels like there is a growing gap between people who are deep in technology/AI space (like myself) and everyone else about whether AI is good or bad. Take, for example, this study [1] done in the US on whether people think AI will have a positive or negative effect on the US over the next 20 years.

Once upon a time—well, in a land of myth and melodrama—a young chap named Icarus got the ultimate upgrade: wings. Handcrafted by his ever-wise (and occasionally overly ambitious) father, Daedalus, these wings were a marvel of ancient engineering, crafted from feathers and wax. Icarus, thrilled by his newfound ability to defy gravity, soared into the sky with the enthusiasm of a kid on a sugar rush.

At Abletech we’re proud of our team’s culture. This week we identified exactly what our team values are. It was great! The workshop was facilitated by our GM Michelle. Everyone had a chance to speak and we collaborated to agree on four team values.

At Abletech we have embarked on the process of seeking advice and following recommendations. Read about some of our efforts below.

Māori Language Week helps us all remember that te reo is a cornerstone of New Zealand culture, and an important part of our country’s heritage. Te reo Māori is an official language of NZ. It’s a great time to be part of the broader language revival and raise public awareness and usage. Our participation links with our #TeamValues.

Where do you start? The New Zealand Sustainable Business Network has lots of great advice. It has published a very good paper on how to calculate your carbon emissions. Following their advice and using the recommended ACE Carbon Calculator, which is an independently developed New Zealand specific tool, NZ is now starting to understand our companies’ contributions to CO2 emissions.

Following on from The Abletech story — part 1 we pick up the narrative at the point where Marcus and Nigel had begun hand-picking developers.

Nigel Ramsay and Tracey Norrish have been using Elixir, instead of Ruby, for an Addressfinder project. Watch a video or read the summary:

Sharesight have joined a group of ambitious fintech startups chosen to make a trip to London. It’s great news for the successful share portfolio tracker company.

Highlights for the Abletech Team were:

Last month Kate Norquay and Sam Gard attended CSSConf and JSConf, held at Melbourne’s Meat Market — an iconic heritage building reimagined as a venue hire space.

The Ruby community holds conferences all over the globe, using local and international speakers, for Rubyists of all levels. The latest conference was a single day of talks held at Te Papa in Wellington which is two blocks from Abletech’s headquarters.

We’re excited to see Kendall’s been recognised for growing her idea into Banqer: a successful revenue generating financial education app.

The latest petra ramsomware virus (which is currently doing a global sweep disabling unpatched windows systems) is a good reminder of the anti-patterns that are prevalent within IT across many large enterprises whom take a risk adverse approach to software development and deployment. It is a result of many bad smells including a slow release cycle, and lack of sandboxing separating the applications from underlying technologies. This cascades into the infrastructure team creating dependency hell and a lack of timely security updates.

Last week we upgraded the software that powers Addressfinder. We turned on HTTP/2. It’s made the autocomplete even faster.

We’re proud to be using renewable and carboNZero certified electricity, supplied by Ecotricity, at our Abletech headquarters.