Reordering photos 🖼️
Hi everyone, it’s Saturday. And you look great today.
This is Afirmativo!, where I send updates about articles that I publish on my blog and share things that have been on my mind lately.
I’m committed to Spanglish
Sorry about that :)
Building a new feature in June 2025
The top requested feature for Lontano was being able to reorder the photos of your place page.
I’ve been postponing it because a) it was actually possible for users to hack their way into reordering pictures by deleting and reading them in the right order, and b) it was complex for me to do.
Building something seemingly simple like this involves adding a new field to the data base, building some logic in the back-end, updating a couple of views, creating some interaction in javascript… all of it well beyond my comfort zone — my comfort zone being getting shit done in chunks of 1-2 hours because this is a side project and even if it wasn’t it’s not like I can focus on anything much longer than that.
So this morning, I decided to give it a try, and I just released the feature to all Lontano users.
Here’s how I built it:
I had breakfast
I set up a bed for my guest
I poured myself some cold brew
I did the dishes
I had some more coffee
I used a minute I had left before a scheduled video conference
…
In between all of these, I gave some instructions to Codex, reviewed the results locally, rinsed and repeated.
Once I was happy with the results on my machine, I merged the code and deployed* it to production.
I am thrilled. Scared. Amused. Concerned. Excited. Definitely having a lot of fun.
You won’t get exploding brain emojis nor an analysis of the future of work on this newsletter, I’m just a dude sharing with friends how I’m experiencing change. But… wow.
That’s all for today.
If you enjoyed reading, send me a line or share it with someone.
Alberto