The One-Woman Dev Team Diaries #194
Struggles with our new barcode scanner, another media appearance, a new work strategy, and a mystery book swap!
Scanner Scaries
Aye aye aye! 😅
You think you’re close to being done, but Android devices have another plan for you… 😩
Turns out, several Android phones were still defaulting to the wide-angle (and so, often blurry) lens on our new barcode scanner.
Rob had the genius idea to let people toggle between all of the cameras available on a device. So, I started working on that…
the mix while debugging an issue.🤪
I had been simultaneously testing on both my iPhone and Android device, but each iteration was taking too long, so I decided to just keep iterating on my iPhone until switching cameras was working flawlessly…
Now, Nadia, the original issue was on Android, was it not? So why would you do that? 🤦🏾♀️
Yup, serves me right.
When I finally got it working on my iPhone and loaded the test build onto my Google Pixel…well, that’s when I learnt that Android phones will only expose one rear camera via the API I was using.
So, the “Switch Camera” feature, while working on iPhone, was never going to work for those that had the original problem. 😭
In the end, we decided to offer a fallback to use the phone’s native camera app if the built-in video feed wasn’t working well. That took several days’ more work to get right, including half a day wasted on a typo 🥲, but it was eventually done, and luckily everybody seems to be very happy!
In Print Again
I was in print again this week. This time, featured in The Week Junior, in a piece that mirrored the size and positioning of how I thought The Observer piece would look. 😆
I couldn’t get my hands on a copy. Did any of you come across it?
Design Focus
After the barcode scanner fuss, I’m sufficiently frustrated by how long it’s taking me to make progress across certain things that I’m switching up my strategy this week.
Barring any critical bugs, I’m only going to be working on the redesign. It comes with so many UI and UX enhancements and I’ve been impatient to get them out.
I know that implementing a new design always takes a lot longer than one might think, especially when the design doesn’t seem too different to what’s currently live, but let’s see how far I get! 🤞🏾
What I'm reading
I spent most of yesterday at a friend’s readathon. She turned her kitchen into a café, where we all hung out for a bit, then we did a mystery book swap, before settling down for some focused reading for a few hours.
I was planning on finishing off Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light but my pick from the mystery book swap, Amy Lea’s Set On You (which, funnily enough, was put into the mix with me in mind) was calling my name. I haven’t had a lighthearted read in a while — five months, it looks like! — and I’m having a lot of fun with it. 😊
Have a great week,
Nadia