Minimum viable mind blowing
A few months ago, I wrote about how I need to “blow people’s minds” with Branch. My thesis was that adding “predefined steps” or templates would be the killer feature for Branch. The barrier of entry for many of the other CI/CD tools is sky high. One way that Branch can be significantly different is by making a lot of WordPress specific assumptions that other tools simply can’t. By assuming that a project is WordPress based, I can present the user with a menu of pick-and-choose steps to add to their build pipeline. This week I took the first baby steps towards this.
The other day I added the concept of “templates” to Branch. It’s a poor man’s version with just a drop down menu, but I actually kinda blew my own mind. Here’s how templates currently looks in Branch:
It probably took me an hour to add this, but the benefit to the user is really high. I knew it would be an important feature, but not until I actually built it and used it myself I realized how important. Something that used to be hard to do from a CI/CD tool, like connecting to a remote server with SSH or deploying to Pantheon or WP Engine with Git, is now literally a few clicks. Back to the title of this blog post: I think templates, even in their current, basic form, is enough to blow a lot of minds when they try them. I hope that, in the future, they can serve as a source of inspiration and education.
What did the Maker do #
In the past week I finished the big refactoring that I have been working on. This has significantly simplified Branch, but also made it more powerful. It has moved a lot of concerns from the Branch code base an into the templates I described above. That means that I can significantly speed up the development of new features - in fact, in the future users will be able to contribute features themselves in the form of templates.
I (obviously) also worked on templates this week. The feature itself didn’t take long, but I spent a lot of time playing around with different workflows on different host platforms to test out different templates.
What did the Manager do #
This week I began a new experiment: Onboarding people with personal screencasts. Basically my plan is to send a personal screencast to everyone I invite into the Branch beta. We will see how long I end up doing this, but for now I think it makes sense. I’m willing to go a long way to make the early users successful and getting developers on calls is notoriously hard. Might as well spend my time recording screencasts instead of endless scheduling with introverted developers. Apparently, not all developers are 76% extrovert like I am…
I talked to Benedikt Deicke of Userlist about the screencast idea on this week’s podcast.
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