The One-Woman Dev Team Diaries #191
Featuring on NBC's Today show and the US Apple App Store, Q1 planning, and finally finishing a book trilogy I started over a decade ago.
She Made It
I am honoured to have been featured on NBC’s Today Show’s She Made It segment on the morning of February 5th, talking about my journey building The StoryGraph.
The producer, Phoebe Curran, reached out at the end of last year to see if I’d be open to a call to determine if I’d be a good fit for the show.
We spoke on January 10th and I was told that night that they wanted to interview me on January 27th. I could do it virtually or in the studio in New York. I chose the latter and spent 30 hours in NYC, starting from the afternoon of the 26th.
I thought the quick trip would be rather stressful, but instead everything went smoothly and I had a wonderful time. I’m so glad I decided to make the quick trip! It was definitely worth it given how the segment came out.
Rob and I ended up doing an all-nighter to fix the Explore page filter menu performance issues, and while there’s still some more to do, we made significant improvements. 💪🏾
The traffic garnered from the segment wasn’t anything to write home about though. We had a small bump in signups that day, but, in terms of live traffic, we didn’t significantly surpass our daily peak time concurrent users.
Still, it’s all part of the marketing machine. Millions more people now know about us and either they’ll tell the bookish people in their lives to check out the app or they’ll eventually sign up themselves. 😁
The US App Store
It’s certainly been the month for media appearances.
The US Apple App Store reached out to me some weeks ago, saying they wanted to repurpose the UK Black History Month piece for their own feature. ✨
To make their article a little different, they asked me a few more questions about the product over e-mail, and that was it!
I've been told the feature will be accessible from the front page all month, so US folks: go check it out!
Luckily, Rob and his wife, Saron, were staying with me during the first few days of February so I was able to see the feature live on a US phone! 😍
Rob in London
It was so cool seeing my co-founder, Rob, give a talk in my home city! I had a front-row seat, of course. 😌
One of my best friends, Jacinda, and my mum came too. With Saron, it was quite the crew. 🥰
Q1 Planning
I started to plan out all of my goals for February, but I decided to be a little smarter this time, a little more realistic. After all, 10 days in February have already vanished. 😩
To that end, I'm looking to map out my goals across the rest of Q1 instead. Achieving everything by the end of March only puts me three months behind my original plans, which really isn't a bad place to be in the grand scheme of things.
I haven't quite finished the planning, but four things that I know I want to focus on in the next couple of weeks are:
Rewriting the barcode scanner: Rob’s given me a great idea for how we can stop relying on the QuaggaJS library and write a new piece of custom software that recognises photos of both barcodes and the front cover of books.
Giveaway in-app downloads: These work for most people, but we still get too many emails each time the latest round of giveaways comes to an end. Right now, app users are redirected to download their prize from their mobile browser, but I want to get the downloads properly working in-app.
Librarian tooling: I’ve been working on a log of edits and the ability to add notes to changes for the Librarians on and off for almost 10 months now. I told our volunteers that I wanted to get out a few bits of new tooling for them in 2024. Instead, I didn’t even finish one tool. I want to get this one out before our next catch-up call. 💪🏾
The new profile page: I teased this — complete with Figma prototypes — across our social media channels and it was nigh-on unanimously loved. I was going to work on the book page redesign next, but I think I have to prioritise the profile page instead!
Mobile prototype | Desktop prototype
What I'm reading
I’m finally starting the last instalment of Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell trilogy, The Mirror & the Light, tomorrow.
Having read the first two books in 2013, I reread them in 2022 to refresh my memory for the third one. In case you didn’t know, it’s now 2025… 🥲
I will probably find a summary of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies online tomorrow. 😅
Have a great week,
Nadia