The One-Woman Dev Team Diaries #181
Exploring Miami with my mum, celebrating Abbie's five years at StoryGraph, and tackling performance bugs!
Miami with Mum
Once again, I am not on my time zone, hence the late email! (Yes, I know I could write them in advance and schedule them, but where’s the fun in that, eh?)
Anyway, for the last few days, I’ve been in Miami with my mum!
We’ve enjoyed exploring the city! If you come to Miami, you’ll likely have Wynwood Walls on your list. While you’re there, do also pay a visit to La Colada for some excellent Cuban coffee!
Five Years of Abbie! 🎉
It’s Abbie’s five-year anniversary of working at The StoryGraph today!
Early 2019, I cold-DM'd her on Instagram, requesting a customer interview to learn more about how she tracked her reading and found new books. Luckily, she replied, the interview was great, and she became one of my earliest supporters.
Back then, I was a one-woman entire team (not just a one-woman dev team), faced with a growing pile of manual work and product to-dos. When I saw Abbie announce her foray into freelance work, I cautiously reached out to ask if she'd be interested in taking the boring manual stuff off my plate. Fortunately, she said yes! 🙌🏾
Since her start of manually adding dozens of books an hour for eight-hour stretches, Abbie has worn several hats at StoryGraph, rising to the challenge every time!
Working with her has been an absolute pleasure, and I'm looking forward to more of it! ✨
I asked our Instagram followers to share why they think Abbie is awesome and here’s a sampling of what they said:
Performance Whac-A-Mole
Aye aye aye! It seems that every time I resolve a performance issue that has arisen since our database migration, another crops up somewhere else or I introduce a bug. 😩
Whenever I get disheartened and impatient with this process, I remind myself how joyous it’ll be when the app has speedy page loads everywhere and when it’ll take a lot more than 10k concurrent users to bring us down! 😌
And Number 1 for Jan 1st 2025, please! 🙏🏾
Workshop
Following on from last week’s 'Ask Me Anything' session (you can still register to get access to the recording), I’ll be running a workshop called Let’s bootstrap a startup from 0-1 on September 26th.
Find out more about what I’ll be covering and get a ticket on the event page.
What I'm reading
Finally back to my super slow chronological King read! Let’s see what I make of Pet Sematary! (No spoilers at all please! I don’t read blurbs so have no clue where it’s going. 👀)
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. :-)