Maker time
The past week hasn’t been my most productive week. I was on vacation with the family in Spain and only clocked a few hours of work every day. As introduced last week I’m splitting these status updates into Maker and Manager time.
What did the maker do? #
I’ve had a lot of calls and conversations in the past few weeks and it has been super helpful and a great learning experience. However I’ve realized that it’s time for me to carve out a lot of Maker time in the coming weeks before Christmas. Branch is not a simple product and there is a lot of work to be done.
This week has been awesome on the Maker front. As mentioned I was on vacation and didn’t work as much as normal. However I got started on the frontend part of the app, which is technically the easy part. One thing that is obvious to me after talking to potential customers, though, is that the interface is super important. WordPress developers are not super familiar with continuous integration tools so Branch needs to be super intuitive. That part is not easy.
On the backend front, the build server, I need to send out a HUGE shout out to my friend Christian. He has basically rebuilt the whole thing with the Docker multi stage build approach I mentioned last week. I can’t believe how much he has already done and I’m learning a lot from him. Thank you! 🙏
I’m super optimistic on the Maker front. There is still a lot of work to do before I have a working beta and it’s stressing me out to be honest, but I’m really excited about the product we are building.
What did the manager do? #
I only had one call scheduled this week, with someone from one of the large WordPress hosting companies. Thanks to Josh Pollock for the intro! That call went really well. This guy is basically helping their agency customers set up a workflow similar to what Branch will offer. We were both pretty excited about the possibility of a direct integration, so he no longer would need to do all of that manually. That’s the second “hosting company person” I’ve talked to now that really liked the idea of Branch. If I can help hosting companies making CI/CD more accessible to their customers that’s obviously a huge win.
Besides that I just spent a ton of time in my head and with my family, while enjoying sunny Spain.
🙏