Conferences and podcasting
Last week was mostly spent in Berlin attending 2 conferences: HostCamp and WordCamp Europe. HostCamp is a small invite-only event for leaders in the WordPress hosting space that I was lucky enough to be invited to. WordCamp Europe is the largest gathering of WordPress developers in the World - 3000 of them!
On Tuesday afternoon, when I was ready to board my flight, I got a note from one of the HostCamp organizers, who had a question about my lightening talk. Oops! I was not aware that I was scheduled to do that… Fortunately, it was only 5 minutes and I was going to talk about some of the topics from the Branch Manifesto. Not too difficult, and it actually went pretty alright. The conference was a great opportunity to connect with some of the hosting companies in the WordPress space and their partner agencies.
The next 3 days were all about WordCamp Europe. It was an intense week of “networking”, where I managed to connect with quite a lot of old friends and also make a few new ones. I was lucky enough to be invited to some awesome dinners and events by various hosting companies there. WordCamp Europe is definitely a highlight of the year professionally for me.
What did the Maker do #
The past few weeks I’ve been working on a large refactoring of the Branch app. I’ve learned a lot from talking to people in the past few months and letting them into the app. The result of that is the refactoring, which will simplify the way Branch works and make the app way more powerful.
One thing that really annoyed me was the “legacy” I already had in the app. Eventually, the few people that are actually using Branch will have to switch to using the “new way” which I’m working on now. However, I wanted to make sure that things wouldn’t break for them until they were ready to switch. That caused a lot of overhead and if/else logic in the app, that felt unnecessary to introduce this early in the life of Branch. Then something occurred to me! I’ve recently switched domains to branchci.com from usebranch.co, however, the app is still on usebranch.co. So I’ve decided to kill 2 birds with one stone and tag the current code base, keep it on usebranch.co for people to use until they are ready to switch, and deploy the refactored code base to the new domain. I wanted to switch domains anyways.
I feel pretty good about this decision and now I won’t have to worry about the legacy and backwards compatibility while doing the refactoring. It’s probably the last time I can make a decision like that. Gotta take advantage of that!
In other news, I’ve also started a podcast with fellow TinySeed'er Matt Wensing from SimSaas. You can check it out on outofbeta.fm 🎧!
What did the Manager do #
The main thing the Manager did this week was attending those 2 conferences and do a bunch of networking and customer development. It’s always awesome to meet WP Pusher and Branch users in real life!
Another nice little surprise was that I had gotten a nice chunk of invite requests after the TinySeed announcement. I had sent those people the Google Form I usually send to new leads and completely forgot about it. When I accidentally checked the spreadsheet the other day I had gotten a bunch of new entries from people wanting to try out Branch. Pretty awesome! By the way, if you want to try it, you can request an invite on the website.
Danke schön! 🙏