The One-Woman Dev Team Diaries #197
Persistent performance issues, more push notifications, a new plan of action, and a request for francophones! 🇫🇷
Performance Pains Persist
The targeted attacks and performance issues have continued over the last couple of weeks. 😭
A lot of people have messaged me (thank you! 🙏🏾) saying I must find this all so stressful, but thankfully, I don’t find it so. I reckon that’s because I have an incredibly high degree of confidence that Rob and I will figure it out and get to a point of stability once again.
It is incredibly frustrating though. 😩
Because when slowdowns crop up, all of my plans for the day go out of the window.
Because a bunch of tasks feel pointless when the app is down.
Because our Play Store average rating tanks, I do an appeal for people who love the app to leave a review, they do, our average rating rises a little bit…and then the app is down again the next day and I’m faced with dozens of unhappy 1-/2-star reviews the next morning, and the cycle starts again…
And because it just sucks knowing that people can’t reliably use the app.
How much more patience will our users have? 😔
Push It
I did manage to find some time to work on push notifications, which gave me some relief from the other issues! 🙌🏾
Rob came across this on Bluesky, which cheered me up when I saw it:
May’s Plan Of Action
Because of all of the performance issues, while I did manage to complete our move off of Pivotal Tracker (out of necessity, frankly!) — we’re trying out Linear — I didn’t manage to tie up the other loose ends.
I’m sticking to May onwards being the Performance, UI, and UX Focus Period, but the other stuff — push notifications, automating Giveaways, Stats V4, and Librarian Log/Notes — does need completing, so I’m going to give those items one hour total per day max and it’ll all get done when it gets done. 🤷🏾♀️
As to Performance, UI, and UX, I haven’t quite yet decided how I want to divide up the week/month. Do I do a few days on one slice? Focus on one for a week and see how far I get? Switch it up every day? Spend a couple hours on each every day? I know I can choose one strategy and switch it up later, of course.
I’ll have a think. 🤔
(But feel free to shoot over any suggestions if you have them.)
Parlez-Vous Français?
I’ve been learning French for over two decades now and this is what my Duolingo streak looks like:
I had reached the point where I was doing the bare minimum to keep the streak going. Given my holidays over the years, it would have made more sense for me to abort my French studies and pick up Spanish and European Portuguese. But I admit I’m a victim of the Sunk Cost Fallacy in this case…and I’ve decided to embrace that wholeheartedly. 😌
I said to myself: Well, since I won’t be giving up my French practice, let me get more out of it! Let me go on some solo trips/workations to France. Let me only converse in French with my French-speaking friends.
What about my French-speaking customers?
And while I have been doing a 30-minute Pimsleur speaking lesson almost every day since July 2024 (I started two days before the above conversation!), I’ve since dropped the ball on this.
But, I’m now picking the ball up again! An old friend got in touch recently, inviting me to his wedding near Paris in July — I’ve not been to a French-speaking country since 2016, the last time I was in Paris 😳 — and I’ve got renewed gusto to make the most of my French studies up until then, especially as I’m extending the trip to a whole week.
And this is where you might come in! If you’re a French speaker, please email me in French from now on and I’ll reply in French, putting words I don’t know or am unsure about in quotation marks (like I did above with “barcode scanner”). I’m going to set myself the challenge of not looking up anything, so any questions I have will be asked of you in my response! 🤓
IG Live
Rob and I did our quarterly Founder Q&A Instagram Live on the 27th. You can watch it back on our IGTV.
What I'm reading
I was reading They Were Her Property by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, but given me feeling a lil’ sleepy of late, the recent StoryGraph issues dampening my mood, and me being behind on my Pages Goal, I needed something more lighthearted and fast-paced to get into, so I’ve also started Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley, The Stacks Book Club pick for May.
Have a great week,
Nadia