Day 473: Side Quests

I came up with a way to describe my biggest weakness when it comes to building products: I get lost in side quests.

For the past several days, I’ve been thinking and writing about how adding commands that make it easier to work with spreadsheets would make flows more useful and reliable.

Arguably, this shouldn’t even be on my list of priorities as it’s a “nice-to-have” feature rather than a “need-to-have” one, but it would unlock quite a few use cases that I personally want to use. So did I work on that?

Nope. I instead spent today building support for being able to link not just one, but multiple Google accounts to Browserflow.

On the scale of 1-10 for “how important is it to do this right now”, adding support for multiple accounts is a -5. It’s a minor edge case that most users won’t encounter.

But somehow, I couldn’t let it be. Switching from a single-account model to a multi-account model requires breaking changes, and I know it’s something I want to support eventually. And then I couldn’t shake the idea that it’d be better to make those breaking changes now, when I have a small number of understanding beta users, rather than later, when I have lots and lots of users. (At this rate, that’ll happen in like 2030.)

I know the point is to slay the dragon, but I can’t help but say yes to that slob Eddy at the tavern who wants me to go pick out some bushels of corn because hey, learning about farming and understanding the lay of the land might come in handy for making the journey to find the dragon.

And then suddenly 50 years have passed, I have crippling arthritis, and the dragon has eaten my beloved wife and my three children. Damn it, Eddy!

This is what happens when even your side quests have side quests.

At least it’s fun…?