Day 162: Week 24 Plan

status

Geez, I was so hooked on Counter-Strike that I totally forgot about doing my weekly planning yesterday. Alternative title for Road to Ramen: “Man commits to habits and promptly forgets about them”.

Weeks 22 & 23

Last week, I did my May review instead of the weekly reflection and planning for week 23. My plan for week 22 was to share Browserflow with some friends and announce it on Road to Ramen. It took another week to accomplish that, but I did it!

I’m quite pleased with how Road to Ramen has been helping me share things more quickly. I started keeping this public journal so that I can build a habit of building in the open, and it’s definitely been effective. This is certainly better than working on things by myself for months before sharing it, but I wonder if I can eventually get to a point where I can be open in real-time. It’d be rad to share the idea when I have it and then bring people along for every step of the way rather than keeping it under wraps for several weeks while I get an SLC working.

That appeals to me because bringing other people along for the ride makes things much more fun, but there’s a part of me that worries whether doing so would affect my working process in a negative way. Nascent ideas are fragile, and perhaps exposing the seed too early might kill it. Or maybe this concern is completely unfounded. I’ll have to give it a try next time and see from my own experience.

Week 24

Since posting the Browserflow demo on Twitter, I’ve had about 10 people offer to help test it, which is promising since I was looking to have 3-5 beta testers. My original plan was to onboard people to Browserflow throughout this week, but I’m going to spend a week or two improving the product some more before having other people try it.

The reason is that unlike other products I’ve built like Intention or Hide Feed, Browserflow is a platform. It’s one of the reasons why I’m incredibly excited to see this product come to life — I have no idea how people are going to use it, and I’m excited to see what kinds of neat flows people come up with.

Because it’s a platform, major changes to the underlying architecture and API will break flows that people build on top of it. For that reason, I want to get the fundamentals right before having other people start using it. While having other people try to build their own flows and provide feedback will definitely help for iterating on the API and is one of the main motivators for having the closed beta, there’s quite a few low-hanging fruit that I’m already aware of.

I know that breaking changes are inevitable as I develop Browserflow, but I want to minimize the number of times that happens because having to debug and fix your flows on a regular basis would get annoying quickly.

My plan for week 24 is to make Browserflow’s API more powerful and in doing so, improve the architecture to make it flexible enough to handle future changes.

Snippets

  • Browserflow

    • Create form for beta testers to sign up for waitlist
    • Support while loops in a flow
    • Support if/else conditionals in a flow
    • Support running multiple flows simultaneously
    • Support running flows with custom triggers (e.g. visiting a site, time of day)
    • (Stretch) Support running flows in the background

  • Show & Tell

    • Organize last session
    • Decide future plans