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So long summer, and thanks.

August news from Cortex.

It's been another really busy summer at Cortex Towers. We welcomed our digital intern for a 6 week placement, we're net 0 on the staff front and whilst Seeker development has taken a brief respite, we've been working away on a mixture of other things.

Read on to find out more!

digital intern

We welcomed Elliot Bewey, a student at the College of FE, for 6 weeks on a work placement / internship.

We put his already impressive technical skills to good use - we had him building a custom management information dashboard for Seeker as well as doing some machine vision in OpenCV for the *vital* (and unsurprisingly difficult) task of live tracking pool balls.

Elliot got to present his time (and show off the dashboard) to an audience at the digital greenhouse (who organised the programme); and go here for Elliot's top tips for aspiring developers.

seeker.gg

As planned, new development on Seeker took a bit of a breather after the initial launch to let things settle in a bit.

Site usage and account sign-ups have been steady and the feedback we've received so far has been great!

Development has commenced on the v2 feature list which will result in a full public launch (and launch party, obvs) soon....

ICYMI: 2019 Q2 States' Property Bulletin - as ever using data provided by Cortex.

Especially For Us: ctx++

We didn't need ten good reasons to welcome our latest recruit to the fold... he said 'you can depend on me' and we sealed it with a... job offer. Read more.

Other happenings

We've now got not one (try saying that fast) but two CSR-type projects (moreorless) on the go... and...

...we've been building out our own internal systems including the Seeker dashboard, a custom billing system as well as - wait for it - relocating some of our stuff out (yes, out) of Microsoft Azure and on to our own virtual infrastructure. Why? This. (ish.)

tech bites

tech and security news we liked this month

analysis of a huge iOS vulnerability discovered by Google (TL:DR; if you're patched you're safe)
Black Hat security conf was on - and the (sponsored) keynote got an absolute roasting (and fairly, for talking incomprehensible gibberish)
this wiseguy in the US quickly regretted trying to NULL his way out of traffic offences
And finally, in bizarre artificial intelligence news: AI startup actually uses humans to do a robot's job.

Phew. That'll do for now. Until next time...
xx from the team at Cortex