Life after Automattic: Week 7

Quick recap.

About two months ago, I accepted Automattic's alignment offer. The gist is that anyone who didn't agree with the company's actions toward WP Engine and the community was free to leave and would receive six months of severance.

As an international contractor, I wouldn't have any right to any amount of severance under normal circumstances. As I didn't align with the actions being taken and didn't get the energy I needed from doing the job, I decided to take the deal.

I decided not to go on a job hunt immediately but to give myself some months to explore side projects, learn new things, and ignite my spark again. I love building things, getting this in people's hands, and coding in general, but in my final months at Automattic, I wasn't doing any of those things nearly enough. Doing all of them daily for the past seven weeks has been a relief and has really made me a happier person.

To keep myself accountable (and not play GTA all day long) I decided to keep a weekly log of what I've been up to: week 1 / week 2 / week 3 / week 4 / week 5 / week 6.

🍎 Apple Woes & Endgame

Almost five years ago, I started developing a simple app: a step counter that counts toward your death. The simple app became more complex over time, and I lost interest.

Reviving this app was one of the first things I started working on after leaving Automattic. After it was finished, I wanted to release it to the App Store but:

 Just as I was nearly finished, I got locked out of the new account.

— Week 4

Three weeks later, after much bureaucracy, I finally have access to my Apple Developer account again. It took so many emails, and in the end it's still very unclear why I got locked out in the first place.

I used the extra time the whole ordeal gave me to make some final changes:

• The app now runs on React Native's new architecture. It feels more snappy and "native".
• I adapted it to store all XCode-specific configurations inside app.json, which makes it possible to deploy to the app store via EAS.

The final build quickly passed Apple's App Store review, and the app is just a button press away from release.

My fingers ache to click the button, but I'm going to do some final testing before releasing it to the world. I've found some minor bugs already, but those will need to be fixed in an update. Release early, release often.

🎁 Lijsje

It's enlightening to see a big idea you had big expectations of fail and a much smaller thing take off.

Two weeks ago, I started building a full-fledged product/gift finder. I wrote infrastructure to parse product feeds of a number of webshops and present the information in a pleasant interface.

I launched the product finder last week, and ... it's rarely used. It seems like people either have a very good idea of what they want to add to their list already (and just copy/paste the link) or don't find what they're looking for inside the product finder.

The second problem is because there's two big omissions from the list: Amazon and Bol.com. Both of these shops don't offer product feeds (since they have millions of items) and instead rely on an closed API to which you need access.

I obtained access to Amazon's API, and instead of trying to merge the results of the API with the product database I created a new tab inside the "Add item" modal just for Amazon.

The Amazon tab gets clicked less often, but people who click it are way more likely to add a product to their list.

One of my goals this week is to try to get Bol.com to approve Lijsje for their affiliate program and offer a similar experience.

As for next features I'd like to be able to offer some customization options for lists, such as password protection and a feature where you'd have to put in your name before being able to take anything of a list. This in turn would allow for some nice 'who's looking at the list' Google Docs like experience:

Misc

• I started work on what will become the next admin panel for Wannabes. It's written in Laravel & Filament, and it's starting to work quite well. Next steps will be working on an importer for the current data & deciding whether this will act like an API for the current Next.js frontend, or if we'll just convert all templates to Blade.

• As everyone has been migrating from X to Bluesky, I dusted off my profile there and you can follow me via my handle @broddin.be. I also created accounts for all my current side projects: @lijsje.be, @woordje.be, @endgame.now and @wannabes.be.
• Augustines, one of the best bands in the world too few people have heard about, have been teasing a reunion since last week. I'm stoked, as I would put their live shows among the best I've ever seen, and William McCarthy is one of the most charismatic frontmen around.