It’s been three weeks since Easter, and this time there’s been plenty of activity, but it’s been an endless slog of the many, many small things that just had to get done, on top of everything the alpha turned up. I miss the fun building part, when features appeared about as fast as I could describe them.
Here’s what that looked like:
- Getting the catalogue to 100%. The agents got the database to what felt like 80 to 90% back in Phuket. But if you’re building a whole app around collecting, people will be looking for every single card and that exact variant, so the checklists need to be as close to 100% accurate as possible. Getting from zero to 90% is quite easy and closing the gap to 100% is very hard, but we’re almost there!
- Data security, privacy and compliance. Launching an app means handling other people’s data, and that comes with a really, really long list: consent before anyone’s card photos are shared, secure accounts that people can manage, GDPR rules on what data we hold and how we delete it, a privacy policy, terms and conditions, and the list goes on. None of it is fun, but it is necessary.
- Reliability. On the happy path everything works quite well. Then there’s an unexplained crash somewhere, or you test on a cheaper phone and something quietly fails. A lot of this bucket is just chasing those down, plus giving people an easy way to send feedback when something goes wrong.
- And many more, like the keyboard covering the box you’re typing in, parallel names too long to fit on the screen, binder pages snapping back when you drag them, and a test build that kept crashing for some inexplicable reason that Claude couldn’t figure out either (thank goodness for adversarial Codex).
Every launch I’ve been part of has ended in a stretch like this, but it feels very different when every one of those small things lands on you. I’m hoping that next time I’ll know a little better, and this end stretch will be a lot more pleasant.