📺 Screencast: Branch beta kick off
In the past few weeks I’ve been deep in the trenches trying to be as ready as possible for my scheduled on-boarding calls this past week. Branch is slowly starting to look like a real product, but there’s definitely still a long way to go. However I’m super optimistic after showing it to the first few customers and seeing their reactions. Yesterday I recorded a new screencast showing where the product is at now.
TL;DR 👉 📺 WATCH THE NEW SCREENCAST HERE
What did the Maker do? #
It’s been a few weeks since I wrote the last update, since I had to prioritize my time and just work on the product. Since my last update I’ve made a lot of small improvements to the CI part of Branch (the build part). When I on-boarded the first customer we realized that Branch was building his theme 3-4 times faster than his current setup which is super exciting to me. I haven’t worried too much about speed yet, but it’s nice to see that Branch is already doing a pretty good job.
Then I proceeded to build the CD part of Branch (the deployment part). This required working on the helper plugin that’s installed on the WordPress site as well. Thankfully I was able to reuse a lot of code from the WP Pusher plugin here, so it only took about a day of work I think. The deployment part of the product is the least polished at the moment. I actually had a few issues getting it to work during 2 of the on-boarding calls. I think we hit some weird SSL issues on the WordPress sites, but since it’s basically a thin WP Pusher client I know I can get it to work. I mean WP Pusher has worked on thousands of sites.
I also got to try a new thing when I did pair programming with Adam Wathan, who helped me out with some Vue.js stuff. This was a lot of fun and something I hope to do again.
Finally, before the first on-boarding session, I managed to set up some basic error handling and logging in the app. This helped a lot during the on-boardings when something didn’t quite work the way it was supposed to.
It’s brutal seeing someone trying to navigate such an early and unpolished product as Branch at the moment. However, after seeing people’s reactions I remain really optimistic despite all the small quirks. One person ended the call saying something along the lines of: “I know this is really early and that everything isn’t working the way you want it to. However, please know that this is really exciting and it’s already solving a very large part of my problem.”
What did the Manager do? #
The manager did 3 on-boarding sessions this week. I’ll do a few more next week and then probably wait a week or two before letting more people in. First session I actually did in-person, since the person I was on-boarding is based in Edinburgh, only an hour away from here.
Historic moment! On-boarding of the first ever Branch user Jason Murray.
Besides the on-boarding I spent a lot of time stressing out about how this is a lot of stuff to do for one person! 😅
Here’s a link to the screencast. If you want to join the beta, sign up in the form below the video.
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