The One-Woman Dev Team Diaries #195
A new registered users milestone, an update on my design-focused week, inspiring 8-11 year olds, and Operation Reduce Tickets.
4 Milli
At 12:29am BST on April 7th, we reached our 4 millionth registered user! 🥳
25-30% are active users, which is generally considered a healthy proportion.
And if 4 million people have registered, then some multiple of that have heard of us around the world! Mad! Looking forward to converting and re-activating more this year! ✨
Focus and Side Quests
Last issue, I said I was going to spend that week focusing solely on implementing the new designs we’ve been sitting on for months.
How did it go? 👀
Well, my goal was to get the profile page done, and I started with that…
But then, these two back-to-back Git commit messages explain what happened after that…
How did I get side tracked?! Well, this is what the upcoming profile page looks like:
See the Reviews box? Nads said to herself: Well, look here, I need that on the new book reviews page…
So lemme just go and do that instead…(and then I’ll probably go back to the Reading Challenges redesign so I can have the updated progress bars…)
Anyway, I ended up doing everything on the new Book Reviews page, except the ratings distribution chart. 😅
The week was over and I had other things to tend to — more on that later — but at least I did complete something, and I’ll definitely be bringing back this “one week, one focus” strategy again.
Careers Week
On April 1st, invited by my wonderful friend, Hannah, who’s a teacher there, I went into a primary/elementary school to run some sessions as part of their Careers Week. I had one session with a class of 10-11 year olds, and then a further two sessions with classes of 8-9 year olds.
At Hannah’s suggestion, I decided to start with a guessing game. From this collage of images, could the kids guess what I did?
We had a whole range of guesses from librarian, author, and publisher, to tech engineer, but I think my favourite guess was the boy who said he thought I was a police officer.
“Why’s that?!” I asked.
“Well, I see the phones and the code in the middle of the screen so I’m guessing you help catch hackers!” 😆
Anyway, I had such an incredibly fulfilling and wholesome afternoon and I hope to do more things like that.
Also, kids aged 8-11 seem so grown! So much sass and banter! My gosh! 😮💨
Operation Reduce Tickets
I always try and be aware of what’s eating up Abbie’s time as she works through support tickets. What can I automate away? Where can I improve the UI or UX so that people aren’t confused?
She’s away on holiday next week and so this was a great opportunity to revisit this stream of work in a focused way.
I got her to track the subject matter of all of the tickets that came through over the course of a week and then we discussed how we’d eliminate the top five recurring issues.
One problem was where people end up with two read statuses for the same book, which technically shouldn’t be possible. When a user is in this state, they cannot take any action to update their reading status on the book.
After some investigation, I realised that the database constraint I thought I had set up from the very beginning, wasn’t configured properly (🫠) and so a lot of last week was spent on me trying to rectify this issue.
The solution is waiting in the wings, but I need to tidy up the existing data, and that’s proving a lil’ difficult without having any downtime… 👀
The One-Man AI/Dev-Ops Team
Rob’s talk from when he was in London is now out! Enjoy!
What I'm reading
As part of the two-person Movie Book Club I have with my sister, I’ll be reading David Chariandy’s Brother this week. I have no clue what it’s about. Don’t tell me! But you can message me next week when I’m done to talk about it. 😁
Have a great week,
Nadia