December 30, 2024

The One-Woman Dev Team Diaries #188

More email provider woes, updates split up into "The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly", the #TryStoryGraphForJan campaign, and a personal dance project. 💃🏾

Just An Unlucky Customer…?

The saga (Part 1, Part 2) with Buttondown was, in fact, not over…

(Before I continue I should note that this is the latest I’ve ever written this email. It’s 10.15pm here in the UK on December 30th. So if you’re receiving this email approximately one hour from then, it’s not Buttondown’s fault, but purely my own doing.)

Anyway, Part 3 of the saga meant that hundreds of people didn’t receive issue #187 until…Saturday!! Almost a whole week after I sent it out. 😵‍💫

Buttondown had this to say…

Given all of the work I’ve got to do, I don’t have the bandwidth to look into making a switch just yet. And they have assured me that everything should be perfect for this issue.

Let’s see.. 👀

Feature Freeze

You know how a lot of companies do feature freezes, especially as the end of the year approaches?

Well…Rob and I never do those at StoryGraph, always wanting to hurry out a load of fancy goodies for the New Year. However, after our experience over the last couple of weeks, we might have to change our policy…

After spending weeks working on it, iOS v1.14, complete with a native bottom navigation tab bar, was ready. I submitted it to the App Store on December 26th and it got approved on the 27th! 🎉

That day, I’m out with my family when Rob sends me this tweet…

Turns out there was a bug in v1.14 where any action involving a confirmation popup was broken, meaning users couldn’t use the “Mark as Finished” button (though there was a workaround), couldn’t remove books, and more.

By the time I got home it was about 1am. Half an hour later I was submitting a new build to the App Store.

Then it was a waiting game! Now, we’re heading into the weekend during a holiday period so there’s every chance the update won’t get approved until the New Year, which would be awful. Already our support desk was swamped with over 700 new tickets. 🫠

Luckily Apple approved v1.15 on Sunday morning, but the whole experience forced us to reconsider our New Year’s approach.

To be honest, this was already meant to be the last year of rushing like mad to get new updates out! 😅

Since Last Time…

Let me split this up into The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.

• The Good
  
  The Paused feature is out and people LOVE it. This might be our most popular feature release ever!

  

  
  The latest versions of the iOS and Android apps feature Push Notification integration. It felt like magic when I hooked this all up. If you’ve approved StoryGraph to send you push notifications already, then we have the power to send a notification just to your phone, as I had fun doing with Abbie yesterday…
  

  

  
  Ideally, by tomorrow, I’ve at least configured our in-app broadcasts to also go out via push notification so that people get notified about the January Pages Challenge and their 2024 Wrap-Up without needing to go into the app! 🤞🏾
  
  We’ve still been breaking traffic milestones and while I’ve not touched a bunch of the performance stuff I planned to yet, some of the work we’ve already done, combined with Rob beefing up our server capacity, appears to be doing the trick.
  
  On December 28th we had our (at the time) all-time third biggest day, measured in pageviews (after Jan 1st and Jan 3rd of this year), and both Rob and I only realised after the fact. We were both hanging out with family. Now, that’s awesome and does bode well for our plans to stay up this upcoming January. We’ll see! 🤞🏾
  

  

• The Bad
  
  I tried to finally fix the barcode scanner but ended up having to revert all of my work. And some people are saying it now doesn’t work for them, even though it did previously… 😩
  
  And, I suspected this might be the case but the reality hurts: implementing the redesigns is taking a long time. There are so many different screen sizes and app states to attend to. I wanted to have the new homepage done before I sent this issue out, but no dice. 😔
  

• The Ugly
  
  The iOS v1.14 release was one.
  
  There has also been a big uptick in Android users getting a persistent error page when launching the app. I finally found a solution to it, massively delaying other work I wanted to get done this year, and then the Play Store kept rejecting my submissions due to unrelated violations of their Subscriptions Policy.
  
  The Plus page has been the same since the app launched in 2021, but after a couple of rejections on the same topic (we only show pricing in USD, GBP, and EUR, and let the Play Store show you the price in your local currency after you tap to subscribe. This is misleading according to Google’s policy), I finally took a couple hours to build a whole country and billing frequency dropdown combo that dynamically updates the price on the page. Finally, Google accepted the app update.
  

  

  
  However, the all-nighter that arose from this work really messed me up today and I was unable to function properly until the late afternoon. 😭
  
  Oh and we have a geographical issue where people in the Philippines can’t access StoryGraph at all. 😔

#TryStoryGraphForJan (AKA Moving The Goalposts 💀)

Yes, I’m delulu, but I haven’t completely lost it. I’m aware my ambitious goals for 2024 will not be achieved. 😢

And so I’m going all in on the #TryStoryGraphForJan campaign I floated last issue. (Can’t stay disappointed for too long. I got work to do. 😂)

Yeji put together an awesome graphic for it and I’m going to be sharing it far and wide. Feel free to do the same!

Now the goal is to finish everything I said I was going to finish this year by the end of Jan instead, with near-daily releases to wow users old and new alike! 😁

Escapism.

Something that I’m proud of is that I always make time for my personal goals and projects, no matter how mad things are at StoryGraph.

To that end, I recently filmed a dance video of a routine I’ve been practising for six months.

I’m so pleased with the final output and you can catch it on Instagram:

What I'm reading

I’ve still got 250 pages to go to meet my Pages Goal so after this goes out I’m going to do a little bit of reading and then do some more tomorrow morning. Here are the books that are seeing out 2024 with me:

Thank you to everyone who read at least one issue of my newsletter this year, and an even bigger thank you to anyone who read every single one. I look forward to continuing to send out great (I hope you think so!) emails in 2025! ✨

Have a great week and Happy New Year,

Nadia