The One-Woman Dev Team Diaries #193
Five years with my co-founder, a trip to the desert, and a new barcode "scanner".
Five Years of Rob
February 22nd marked exactly 5 years of Rob being officially part of StoryGraph! 🥳
(Yeah…forgot to mention it last issue… 😅)
It’s been a magical partnership! It’s so awesome to have met somebody who aligns with my vision for the company and matches me in work ethic, drive, and ambition.
We have a lot of fantastic discussions, communicate really well during (very rare) times of disagreement or differences of opinion, and know how to have fun together (think epic VR ping pong battles).
I’m excited to see where the product and our partnership is at after another five years of this. ✨
Palm Springs
I didn’t do as much work as I wanted to this week as I’ve been enjoying Palm Springs and Indian Wells with my dad.
We came for the tennis but have been able to go on a couple excursions too! Here we are in Joshua Tree National Park yesterday:
If you’re in the area and want to go on a guided hike or backpacking trip in the park, I highly recommend Travis Puglisi of Wandering Mojave. Tell him I sent you!
Soft Launch “Scanning”
What I did manage to finish off this week work-wise though is the new barcode “scanner”!
Scanner is in inverted commas because now the user manually captures a photo of a barcode or cover and then they’re taken to the respective book.
Here I am testing out the Owned Books scanner using a cover photo on my Kobo:
Rather than using a third-party library, we’ve developed an in-house solution, which is already proving to be much more reliable. 🤞🏾
Up Next
The app has been slow lately and Rob has identified some database network issues. We’ve ordered some new servers to alleviate the problems and we’re hoping that they’re all set up before my next issue.
Coding-wise, I’ve got three weeks left before Q1 is over! 😳
Hoping to finish off native in-app downloads for Android, the profile page redesign, the Librarian Log/Notes tooling feature, and more! (Namely all of the things I wanted to finish before the end of last year. 🤪)
What I'm reading
I’m finally reading Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov for Traci Thomas’s The Stacks Book Club.
She has a goal to read more classics this year in order to better contribute to literary discourse and I’m hoping to follow along where I can!
Have a great week,
Nadia