The One-Woman Dev Team Diaries #192
An unexpected newspaper feature, StoryGraph from 2019, and the making of small, but steady, progress on all fronts despite distractions! 💪🏾
In Print
On Wednesday February 12th, freelance journalist and writer, David Barnett, sent me an email asking if I would be open to speaking with him that week for a piece he’d pitched to The Observer, a Sunday-only UK newspaper (sister to The Guardian).
Oh no, I thought. I don’t have time for this. I asked David if we could chat the following week instead.
But the paper are “quite keen to run it this weekend.” (Emphasis David’s.) Are you sure you can’t make it work?
Okay then. A quick 30-minute chat tomorrow.
The next day, before our chat: Do you have time for a photoshoot in London in the next couple of days?
Me: Huh? No way! Unless, of course, we do this all next week…?
David: No, we’ll stick with this week. Just send some pictures over.
Now, the request for the photoshoot should have been a sign that this was bigger than I thought, but I didn’t think too much of it beyond: “This is all very last minute! Why the big rush?”
After our chat and me sending over some photos, David emails back thanking me and saying the piece “should be in print and online sometime on Sunday!” and I thought to myself: “Oh, print, huh?!” This whole time I assumed it’d only be an online article.
Even still, I thought the article would just take up a small corner of a page.
…
The morning of Sunday the 16th arrives and Abbie beats me to getting a copy. She didn’t want to spoil the surprise, but I didn’t think there was anything to be surprised by so I asked her to send me a photo…and I gasped when it came through. 😲
There’s video footage on Instagram of me seeing a copy in real life for the first time. 😊
Fun fact: On the day the respective media went live, we got more new users from the Observer feature than from the NBC Today Show one. Only by a few thousand, but still! (I have theories as to why!)
…
The next day, I’m back to minding my business, and doing some iOS app development.
When I was done, I went into the App Store to re-download the official version and…
We were Number 2 in the UK App Store Books chart!
I didn’t think to check the Store on the day the article came out. We might have reached Number 1! 🤦🏾♀️
Oh well! 😁
Blast From The Past
A friend messaged to congratulate me about The Observer and took the opportunity to make a joke and revive a 2019 conversation about a feature request he’d made back then.
The old conversation had included a screenshot of StoryGraph on Kindle:
Since last time…
So, as you’ve read above, media stuff has still been distracting me from focused dev time, but I did manage to map out how I want the rest of Q1 to go (5 weeks left, eek!), and I did make progress on each of the four items I called out last issue:
Rewriting the barcode scanner
Us admins have got it real good. We’re enjoying a fantastic alpha version of this feature right now.
Here’s how it works. You click on the scanner icon in the search bar and this pops up…
Then, you capture a photo of a book cover or barcode, you see a “Processing…” message, and then you’re taken to…
...the book page for Trevor Noah’s Born A Crime.
Hehe. Yeah, I still need to hook in the API Rob has developed for this so that a user is taken to the actual book they’re looking for, but I think we’re days away from this being live.🤞🏾
Giveaway in-app downloads
It took so long to figure out, but the latest version of the iOS app features native downloads for giveaway prizes.
Something similar is coming to Android soon! I prioritised iOS this time around as it had another bug which needed fixing.
Librarian Tooling
For the Librarian Edit Log I’ve finally finished the code for displaying all of the different edit types in a readable format (For any Librarians reading this immediately after the email has gone out, I haven’t deployed it yet, okkurrr!) and next up will be adding the ability for a Librarian to add a note when they are making changes to book records.
Profile Page Redesign
I did most of the header design changes and deployed the bio feature! 🎉
What I'm reading
Fall was a book I randomly picked up in a bookstore a year or so ago. I knew nothing about Robert Maxwell…
Well, I know a lot more now… 😳
(Also, funny coincidence with me being featured in a newspaper the week I started this book!)
Have a great week,
Nadia