The One-Woman Dev Team Diaries #196
Performance pains, a roadmap re-prioritisation, some excellent screen adaptations, and some helpful product updates!
Performance Pain
In our retro last week, Rob kicked off with an “extreme happy” point, and I said: “Well, I’d like to start off with an extreme sad. Lately, when I check through Play Store and App Store reviews, or go through our mentions on social media, 80-90% of the comments are about how the app has been so slow lately or how it’s not loading at all, or all the user is seeing is a blank screen…and it’s the worst!”
And there have been a bunch of reasons for the recent slowdowns and outages. Everything from miscalculating resource requirements and developer error, to targeted attacks and La Liga matches in Spain. 😫
There’s a lot to work on and several features I’d queued up for Q2, but enough is enough. This has got to stop.
So, I’m switching up my roadmap for the rest of the quarter.
For the final 10 days of April, I’m going to wrap up some loose ends around push notifications, giveaways, stats, and Librarian tooling. I also need to move off of my project tracker — anybody got any recommendations? — as Pivotal Tracker is being shut down on April 30th. 😢
Then from May onwards, there’ll be a freeze on new features while I focus only on performance and implementing the redesign. If it doesn’t make the app faster or look and feel better, then I’m not interested. 😌
It’ll be great if that stream of work could all be complete by the end of June, leaving the second half of the year to play with, but if it’s not done, I fear the feature freeze will have to continue. 🥶
Based on the book…
I’ve been having a lot of fun with books and their film/TV companions recently.
A couple weeks ago, I started David Chariandy’s Brother on the Wednesday, finished it on the Friday, and watched the movie with my sister that night, after she had also finished the book earlier that day.
A wonderful time was had and consuming the content so close together made the experience of reading the book far richer, especially because there was someone else to discuss it with and all of the details were fresh for both of us. 😊
Just before I started Brother, I finally finished the 900-page The Mirror & the Light, the last instalment of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy.
This was just in time for Saturday, when I met up with a couple friends to watch two episodes of the six-part BBC adaptation, which remains absolutely excellent, especially the performances from Mark Rylance and Damian Lewis. 😮💨
We loved the first two books and their TV adaptations in prior years — I first read Wolf Hall in 2013 and we finished watching the TV adaptation of the first two books early 2023 — so it’s been a real treat to be able to dive back into Tudor England.
Since last time…
I did take the app down, accidentally, in a bid to fix the duplicate read status issue I mentioned in issue #195. Oh well, it’s fixed now! 😅
I finally launched the first version of Librarian Notes, where our volunteers can add a comment when they make any changes to a book. This is to improve communication between our librarians and prevent overwritten/back-and-forth edits.
And, users can now link to their socials from their StoryGraph profile. 🙌🏾
That was the last bit of redesign work I’m doing this month!
What I'm reading
After finishing Catching Fire a few days ago, I decided to go straight into the final instalment of Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games trilogy, Mockingjay.
Have a great week,
Nadia