The One-Woman Dev Team Diaries #183
Reflecting on how there's not long left in 2024, building for what's working instead of your original vision, and an ambitious variety of focal points for the next couple of weeks.
10 Weeks To Go
There are only 10 weeks left in this year that I had such high hopes for! 😅
But, because I’m full-on delulu, I really believe that I’m going to achieve most of my goals, despite being months behind on my to-do list. 👀 (Well, I did have a wildly productive last few weeks of 2023.)
I’m one week into a two-week workcation in Portugal and well…for a bunch of reasons…I’ve not done nearly as much work as I’d hoped. It’s time to go into deadline mode for the rest of the year.
Wish me luck and productivity for my final week here! 🍀 💪🏾
(And please don’t message me about taking it easy, looking after myself, not stressing myself out, finding balance, etc. I’m good! 😊)
Mr. StoryGraph Takes The Stage
One of the events during my first week here was Rob’s first ever conference talk! 🤩
He did such a fantastic job at NDC Porto talking about all of his work on StoryGraph.
If you know of any conferences looking for keynote presentations that cover the story of how one man, without a Computer Science background, came to singlehandedly build and maintain the AI and backend infrastructure of an app used by millions of people around the world, serving three-hundred million requests per month, then Rob’s your guy!
Hit ‘Reply’ and I’ll put you in touch with him.
Giveaways: Building For What’s Working
When we first launched our Giveaways Beta a couple of years ago, we started with a round of giveaways that all began on September 19th and ran for a month.
We continued to run these set rounds each month, aiming to build up our host user base. The goal was to eventually have new giveaways starting daily, ensuring there'd always be fresh ones for our users to explore.
One of this year's goals is to officially launch our giveaways platform. To test the waters, I made a 'custom date' add-on available for purchase, but only a few people signed up to run one.
Conversely, while we had to chase publishers and authors in the early days, our set rounds now fill up without much effort on our part.
This got me thinking: Rather than trying to build an unproven system, why not start by automating a system we know works and has demand?
To that end, we're planning to launch giveaways with our set group rounds — something we originally thought was a temporary bootstrapping measure — with the option for hosts to buy an upgrade that enables them to customise the dates.
Up Next
What’s on the menu of things I plan to work on over the next couple of weeks?
Upgrades: Getting on the latest version of all the main pieces of software we use
Native App Flows: Incorporating the use of modals in our apps to improve the user experience
Database Fine-Tuning: Dealing with the few outstanding bugs and performance issues left over from our migration a couple months back
Barcode Scanner: Addressing all of the current bugs, including the zoom issue introduced in iOS18
Pause Books: Introducing a new read status so that users can mark books as ‘paused’
Librarian Tooling: Giving our Volunteer Librarians the ability to see a log of all edits made and add notes to their changes
Now, I’m unlikely to finish all of these things but I’m going to spend at least two hours (one per week) on each of them.
I’ll report back next issue! 🫡
What I'm reading
To enter Livraria Lello you have to buy a ticket. This goes towards a book from their special edition collection of classics. I’ve been hearing great things about Bram Stoker’s Dracula so decided to go for that. I’m enjoying it so far!
Have a great week,
Nadia