Progress is Hard, but how about a Survey?

TLDR: I’d love to know what you value in a writing tracking tool. I would appreciate you filling out this survey.

Although, I might question why you’re reading a blog post if you’re looking for something short and sweet, but I don’t want the survey link getting buried in my musings, so I’m putting it right at the top.

If you’re here, you probably know, but just in case you don’t, I’m currently working on a combo Discord bot/web app for writing sprints and writing tracking. This is a solo endeavor that I’m attempting in the bits of time I have around job hunting/interviewing, upskilling/learning, and my other commitments, and while I know what I want out of this app, I would love it if others would also get something out of this app. While I’m hoping to get continuous feedback as I build the app through testers, I’d also like to know what people like and don’t like out of their current writing tracking tools and what they might be looking for, before they actually interact with what I’m building. So! I would very much appreciate you taking the time to fill out the survey. Thank you so much!

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Honestly (and unfortunately), not much! I’ll elaborate more in the Developer’s Log, but I did hope to have something a bit more tangible to share by now. So, I’m attempting to distract with a survey. I am still trying to get a simple sprint-running bot going before I get testers involved.

Also, how do we feel about What’s New with Writi as a section title? I’m still experimenting with the structure of these posts but some other titles I considered were Writi’s Updates and Under the Cap (because Writi is a mushroom?).

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Some of you may wonder what the difference is between app news (What’s New with Writi) and updates from the developer (me). The purpose of the Developer’s Log is more around my process and musings not just about the development of this app, but also about my life as a software engineer in general. It’s not meant to be super technical, but there may be some software terms that I may throw about, but the goal is that it’s still interesting even for those with little technical background.

So, what have I been doing if not working on Writi? Well! The job market has seemingly picked up a bit, so I’ve actually been getting callbacks from my applications and prepping for interviews. This means researching companies and my interviewers, refreshing on topics that might be discussed, practicing for coding and system design interviews, and for one company I’m currently talking to, doing their take-home. For those unfamiliar, a take-home is basically a coding assignment you complete on your own time (although you’re usually given something like a week to submit). Someone at the company reviews it, and if you pass, you move on to the next round. I did move on to the next round (yay) but haven’t had those interviews yet, so we’ll see how that goes. The market is very competitive, though, so I’m not trying to have high expectations.

Another exciting thing is that I got a project accountability group going for software engineering projects! As I mentioned earlier, building this app is a solo endeavor, but I thought having some other software engineering folks to share progress and maybe talk through problems would be fun and helpful. I put out a call in a network I’m in for female and nb software engineers and I got wayyy more interest than expected that eventually I had to close the thread. We had enough people to make two groups of six and I joined one, but I organized the meeting times and such for both of them. People often underestimate admin work, but it takes time!

One of the tasks I told my accountability group I wanted to get done for this project was to create and post the survey in a blog post, so this is me doing that! (Never mind the fact that I’m meeting with them again tomorrow, but hey, we can argue that the accountability group worked!)

Anyways, let’s hope I have some more exciting news next time! And thank you in advance for filling out my survey. 😁

🌱 angela

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