#150 - Personal Hackathon

#150

                            July 17, 2023

                #150 - Personal Hackathon

                        A personal coding marathon weekend, features under the radar, improvements to giveaways, a collaborative short story, and a decades-old book rec.

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#150 | 17 July 2023

Personal Hackathon

Last week I noticed that the upcoming weekend was my first completely free one in forever: no family or social obligations, no dance classes booked in, no events to attend.

So, I decided to run my own personal hackathon!

I planned out a wishlist of features and interspersed hours of focused coding time with fun activities for myself: reading (of course), catching up on a fave TV show over a nice dinner, listening to new How I Built This episodes on a walk, playing a new VR game...

As a result of the weekend, you can now edit out typos in buddy read comments! 🙌🏾

I started each day at the gym and didn't look at messages or social media at all until night. 💪🏾

Overall, it was awesome, and while I spent a large portion of the weekend working, it felt a lot like me-time of the very best sort!

Of course, I didn't get as far through my features wishlist as I'd hoped to. Case in point: For the final scheduled coding hour of Saturday I wrote out a list of three things I wanted to complete. The first thing in the list — editing buddy read comments — took me three hours... 😅

Since last time...

Authors and publishers who purchase a Premium giveaway can now customise the final in-app notification that goes out to all non-winning entrants:

I've been having a lot of fun on Threads and posted the following there and on Twitter the other day:

The responses have been interesting and illuminating!

The short story experiment I was running on Instagram is now complete!

Pretty good, eh??

As a community, we've decided to do more...and well...maybe keep your eyes peeled for StoryGraph's Collaborative Short Story Anthology...! 😆

Finally, as part of my hackathon, users can now search and filter down prompts when adding books to reading challenges! 🙌🏾

Next two weeks

I was planning to be done with finally allowing users to add any book to a challenge from prompt pages this weekend, but alas — I got stuck for hours!

Finishing that piece of work will hopefully be one of the things I achieve in the next two weeks. 🤞🏾

What I'm reading

I was first recommended Ray Dalio's Principles almost a decade ago while at my software coding bootcamp. I saw a lovely hardback edition while in a bookstore a couple weeks back and thought it was high time I checked it out!

Have a great week,

Nadia

P.S. Know somebody who's an avid reader or would enjoy following along with this journey? Please do forward this email to them! Thank you. :-)

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