Day 520: Productive Procrastination

product

Had my first productive day since coming to Hawaii! Heck yeah, it’s about time.

Well… it wasn’t quite productive because I worked on stuff completely unrelated to launching / onboarding, but I’m counting this as a win because I was able to finally focus and churn out some code instead of alternating between feeling sleepy and sauntering over to the kitchen in hopes of finding something yummy even though there was nothing there an hour ago and there’s no reason to believe something magically appeared in the meantime.

This morning, I had a call with John (can you believe it? I’m ramping up onboarding calls!) who had signed up on the Browserflow waitlist to automate taking screenshots of his company’s product so that their documentation can stay up-to-date even as their UI changes.

We got it working locally just fine (🎉) and I mentioned that while Browserflow Cloud supports running flows on a schedule which would be perfect for this use case, it currently doesn’t support saving files. I had been putting it off because storing files on behalf of users would require introducing quotas, automatically deleting files after some time, providing a way to access the files easily, etc. Just a lot of stuff that I didn’t want to deal with just yet.

John mentioned that it’d be enough to have the files be stored in Google Drive — I hadn’t considered that before! That would eliminate the need for me to store the files myself.

Even though I wanted to spend today building the onboarding flow like I’ve been meaning to for ages, I ended up building support for downloading files and uploading them to Google Drive. Proud of how today went because this is a Pretty Big Feature and it only took a day to knock it out.

Lessons from today:

  • Talk to users — you’ll find better solutions compared to just thinking on your own

  • Having someone ask you for a feature is way more motivating than building something because you think it’ll probably come in handy

    • Yet another reason to wait until someone asks me for something before building it out