Day 266: Week 39 Plan

Week 38

Planned

• Pillars

  • 🆗 Sleep before 12am at least 3 times

    • Slept before 12am twice and 12:30am last night. Good enough for me but didn’t want to put a checkmark since it didn’t quite meet the criteria.

  • ✅ Work out at least 3 times, do yoga at least once

    • Great! Worked out 3 times and did yoga TWICE. Yee!

  • ✅ Meditate for 20+ minutes at least 3 times

    • Been meditating first thing in the morning since moving to Oregon

• Browserflow

  • ❌ Identify and resolve state syncing race condition

    • Didn’t work on this at all

  • ❌ Add support for flow-level parameters for calling flows in flow

    • Nor this

  • 🆗 Allow inserting commands and recording anywhere

    • Haven’t solved this entirely but my current solution is much better than it was before

Unplanned

• Life

  • ✅ Moved to Oregon! Going to be here for a month.

• Browserflow

  • ✅ Added support for reading data from Google Sheets
  • ✅ Added support for writing data as CSV

Reflection

I moved to Oregon to stay with my friends David and Ranna for a month and it’s incredible what a difference it’s made to my well-being. I mean, I wrote my Road to Ramen entries while the sun was still out for the past several days! (This one’s an exception because I got sucked into working today.) Honestly though, how delayed my R2R posts are is a pretty good indicator of my mental health and energy levels — if I’m consistently writing posts at like 1 or 2am, I’m almost certainly not having a good time in general.

It’s only been a few days so I’m going to resist declaring that moving has forever changed the game, but I’m quite encouraged by how much easier it’s felt to take care of myself (sleep, exercise, eating well, meditation) now that I’m not at my parents’ place. This is something I need to examine more deeply, but I feel like I become the worst version of myself when I’m there. Low energy, lack of an internal locus of control, irritability — everything feels harder when I’m stuck in my room all day in a house that’s falling apart. In contrast, having a room here where (a) I’m not burning up (b) not being ravaged by mosquitoes and (c) have good company has made an incredible difference.

Week 39

Despite my self-admonishment a few days ago where I firmly told myself to build dat gallery for Browserflow, I’m having second thoughts. Two reasons:

1. Shortcuts

   Oh. My. God. I spent three hours yesterday singing the praises of one feature within Shortcuts on iOS, but that doesn’t even begin to cover how incredibly well thought out this app is. I haven’t been this smitten by a piece of software in quite a long time. My appreciation for the app’s simplicity and design is amplified a hundredfold due to my personal experience working through the challenges that come with building an automation platform.

   Playing around with Shortcuts makes me want to invest significant energy into improving the process of creating and editing flows in Browserflow. I know that it’s unreasonable for me to compare what I’ve built in the last several months to a product that’s been refined over the last 6 years, but there are so many gems in Shortcuts that I can’t help but see how helpful they’d be to incorporate in Browserflow. I also had some epiphanies while playing around with a Chinese web scraping tool called Octoparse that might significantly improve Browserflow’s UX.

2. Onboarding David

   I onboarded David to Browserflow today, and it was humbling. Because I built the thing, using Browserflow feels easy and it’s usually pretty straightforward to build and debug complex flows. But watching my buddy with a computer science degree struggling to figure out what the heck’s going on showed me that there’s still a looooooong way to go before Browserflow feels easy to use.(Not to mention that some core Browserflow functionality like clicking on buttons seems to have issues on Windows — kill me.) I’ve been slowly buying into the idea that perhaps a tool like Browserflow would only really be usable by other developers, and that’s why playing with Shortcuts has been so mind-blowing. It convinced me that you can build a full-fledged automation platform that’s simple enough for non-technical people to use and love.

   Still, even if Browserflow isn’t developed enough for people-who-are-not-me to easily build flows, that doesn’t mean that there wouldn’t be a lot of people who’d be down to run flows. I’ve already built flows like saving a list of everyone I’m following before automatically unfollowing them on different social media sites that I know some people would want to run.

All this rambling is to say that I’m stuck between (a) improving the product so other people can easily build flows and (b) sharing flows that I build myself.

Given how minimalist (and unhelpful) the Browserflow landing page is, it’d certainly help to throw some demos up there so that people don’t have to slog through my Twitter feed to find the ones I’ve made.

I read earlier this week that Zapier found people who wanted their solutions and charged people to join their beta — maybe that’d be interesting to try? I can build a bunch of demo flows and tell people that they can pay $5 or something to give them a try and get super exclusive VIP verified limited edition support by yours truly. That would make sure that I’d mostly be working with people who care about this enough to pay a few bucks for it.

Or do I go into hermit mode and try to make Browserflow’s UX less of a dumpster fire?

I FEEL LIKE I’VE BEEN ASKING MYSELF THE SAME QUESTION FOR LIKE A MONTH NOW

but man, i’m really excited to work

Plan

• Life

  • Sleep before 12am at least 3 times
  • Work out at least 3 times, do yoga at least once
  • Meditate for 20+ minutes at least 3 times

• Browserflow

  • Sync flows to Firebase
  • Allow sharing flows