Shallow Work

I thought that when I got back from my trip to the States I’d be able to lock in to some deep coding work.

I’ve been home for just under a week and this is yet to happen. 😩

What sorts of things have been taking up my time?

Weddings, photoshoots (don’t ask…maybe more on them later…), emails (that have been piling up…), working out (essential, especially as I took a rest during my trip bar a couple of runs), bug fixes, seeing out-of-town friends who are in town last-minute and will likely not be back for years…

I’ve decided to spend the last few days of July front-loading all of my outstanding, overdue life admin and then lock in to feature work in August and September (still amid weddings, trips, and birthdays, including mine).

Oh, here’s me at my friend’s Nigerian wedding yesterday having my gele tied:

On Thursday I’m travelling a little out of London, to a castle, for Round 2 of their wedding. 😍

SGAI

When most people see “AI”, they immediately think “ChatGPT” or “Claude”, conflating OpenAI and Anthropic with the technology.

On top of that, Rob has done so much work to approach AI-powered features in StoryGraph in a careful and considered manner.

To this end, I recently proposed a renaming “Powered by AI” to “Powered by SGAI”. “Powered by AI” risks people assuming we’re farming things out to third-party services. The new label will be clickable with a tooltip that explains how our AI is an in-house solution that keeps our user data private and runs on roughly the power of a single gaming PC.

The tooltip will also feature a way for the user to turn Who’s It For? off without needing to go to the Preferences page.

The feature is off by default and always has been. Users have to switch it on themselves, but a handful of people forget that.

Roadmap Reshuffle

Because of how long the Kobo work took, I had to push back all other planned work.

I’d originally left Q4 free, but it was now completely full, except for our planned feature freeze.

And I didn’t like that. I didn’t like that one bit.

No wiggle room. A lot of things I wanted to get done this year would have to be pushed back to 2027… 😭

But then Rob made a proposal in our last team meeting that I was drawn to immediately.

What do we want people to be saying come Jan 1st 2027? What do we not want them to be saying?

We want them to think StoryGraph is a joy to use, is gorgeous to look at, is fast… If we shipped no new features from today onwards, but those three things were true, we’d be in an excellent position.

We’ve done a lot of work on performance this year, but not as much on the UI and UX. There are still redesigns that I’m sitting on that are now two years old. 😱

So, apart from the proposed Community/Social work, and then the merging of buddy reads and readalongs, we’ve decided that everything else for the rest of the year will be UI and UX.

That’s the current plan. You’re getting advance notice.

We’ll see if I end up sticking to it. 👀

And if I finally end up delivering on it. 😩

What I’m Reading

In a few weeks I’m going on holiday to Italy with my siblings, and for this third edition of our biennial sibling trip, we’ve decided it’d be fun to read a book together.

I used our Buddy Read Book Suggestions feature to see which books the app suggested my sister and I could have a great time reading together, and came across this trilogy of novellas by Moses Ose Utomi. It seemed a great fit and so now the plan is to read The Lies of the Ajungo and The Truth of the Aleke before the holiday, discuss those two during the trip, and then read the final instalment when we’re all back home. 🤓

Have a great week,

Nadia