Frozen

This is it! We’ve arrived. The moment I’ve been talking about for a year is finally here. StoryGraph’s first holiday feature freeze is in effect! ❄️

No more deployments until the New Year! (Apart from maybe a small, cheeky one for the 2025 Wrap-Up. 👀)

I was up coding until 3am this morning, thinking I could maybe push through for another few hours and cross some more things off of my “MUST-DO” (😅) list...

But, no. I was too tired to continue. So I called it.

In the last two weeks, I’ve:

• Redesigned the mobile book page, including the ability to enlarge the book cover
  

  

• Made UI/UX tweaks to the book pane on a list view

• Made performance improvements to loading book panes on a list view

• Added pagination options to the To-Read and Owned Books pages
  

  

  

• Fixed accessibility and VoiceOver bugs in the iOS and Android apps

• Redesigned the New and Edit Review pages
  

  

  

And more, including a bunch of bug fixes.

While I’m pleased with what I did manage to achieve, I’m not fully happy. I know what my productivity and output were like during the last two, even eight, weeks. And I could have done better.

But such is life: you win some, you lose some. 😪

Bounce Back

Thank you to everyone for the messages in response to my heartbreak. Shoutout to Travis for my favourite one:

It turned out to be true as I did have some really great moments during the last two weeks, relating to work, the gym, and the heartbreak situation itself, and I felt such a high after each one.

James Clear had this in his recent 3-2-1 newsletter and it really resonated with me:

I think I’m very good at this.

For example, it wasn’t long after I’d done my last deploy this morning, looking at all of the things I hadn’t achieved, that I was reframing the scenario in my head:

Well, a feature freeze just means I’m not deploying code. Doesn’t mean I can’t code! Oooh boy, the deploy on January 5th is gonna be sweeeet! 😆

We won!!

The Apple App Store Award we were nominated for?

We won it! 🥳

Apple wanted me to be in LA a couple weeks ago for their Developer Showcase, but given all the work I had to do, I couldn’t make it.

I’d suspected we’d won at that point and that they wanted to present us with the award there. Luckily Rob could attend and collect it for us.

I think this is an awesome photo! Who knew Rob could be such a model?? 🤩 👏🏾

On the day our win was announced, I noticed we reached No. 3 on the UK App Store Books chart (and No. 5 in Canada. Thanks, Aly!). Not sure where we got to in the US. Did anybody notice?

20K +

I’ve been saying for days to the team that we’re going to cross 20k Plus users any day now, and in the run-up to the feature freeze starting, I missed the moment it happened! 🤦🏾‍♀️

But yay! 🎉

That’s 20k people who intentionally went out of their way to pay us (because we don’t take payment details for the free trial). 🥹

What I Read Last Month

Check out What I Read In November:

I know… We’re already halfway through December but that’s what happens when your newsletter only comes out once every two weeks. 😆

Let me know if I happen to influence any of your final 2025 reads!

What I'm Reading

I’ll be tackling Friday Night Lights by Buzz Bissinger for the final pick of 2025 of Traci Thomas’s Stacks Book Club. I love me a good sports story!

(I’m now three-quarters through Middlemarch, still keeping up — mostly — with mine and Jo’s reading schedule. By the next issue I should be done!)

Have a great couple of weeks, including a Merry Christmas if you celebrate!

Nadia