April 26, 2021
This coming week, though — bug fixes. For real this time: I need to ameliorate some of the incoming customer service and bug fixes are the way to go. Honest! I’m building out a Things project and everything!
Hey, I did this! I picked out the five most noxious bugs (in terms of “time I have to spend answering questions around them” and also “embarrassment that they are extant bugs”) and by Sunday I had fixed four out of them. The fifth is — perhaps, dear reader, you are familiar with this one! — the whole “cursor randomly jumps to the top of the textarea” bug, which I am still as of yet unable to reproduce. There is even an entire blog post about this genre of bug, which was both heartening (I am not the only one!) and disheartening (this may remain forever unsolved!)
I chanced upon my 2021 goals doc again. It was nice to read through — it is unfair to call it borne out of naivety, because a lot of the work was sound and sage, but the context of December 2020 does not match the context of April 2021. One of the unsolved problems I called out in the doc was DNS onboarding woes, which feels...like a thing I want to solve sooner rather than later, as it’s probably something like 40% of my onboarding effort at the moment (and also a significant pain point for folks, particularly the less technically savvy.) What “improving onboarding” looks like is a little murky, and I think it’s easier to start by iterating out a list of common hangups:
- Some DNS providers automatically inject the root domain to the end of keys, so people end up setting records at, like,
email.domain.com.domain.com. - MX records conflict — you don’t need to set them if you have existing MX records, but that copy is a little ambiguous, so people get confused.
- The visual language of the verification pane I use is admittedly, uh, confusing and unaesthetic.
...Is that it? That might be it, besides the general angst of “I hate DNS and rightfully my users do too.” (I am desperate for something like Domain Connect to hit the mainstream — let me specify the records and just have the users log in!)
So maybe the solution here is less sweeping and more granular: move the verification flow to a modal and clean it up, aggressively warn people about MX, proactively check for existing MX records, proactively check for the domain.com.domain.com thing. That seems pretty doable.
This week, in general, was a bit of a much-welcomed downbeat. MRR is still trending positively but it is less of a rocketship than March; I only had to budget around an hour each day for emails & customer service work (compared to the two-to-four hours in most of March.) I’d really like to get the steady state down closer to around thirty minutes, so I can start working on features & a better web presence without feeling guilty (or spread too thin.)
All of that is to say, I think the DNS work is a worthy goal for the week ahead. Once that lands, I think I’ll be in a good spot to spend May on dessert work: JavaScript exfiltration, support for attachments, that sort of thing.