October 2022 🎃 - Events @ Hubs & Background Check-in on Android

Gian Lazzarini -

Growth & Metrics

Growth has wained this month only going from 180 users from the beginning of the month to 199. I attribute this to some perf & stability issues I'm working to resolve. Also this month was rather busy so I've shipped less updates to the app which may have contributed to the slowed growth this month.

However I suspect the biggest contributor to the reduced user growth is that now that the background check in/out is working on Android the app swarms the user with permission prompts right at app launch. I think this is scaring away prospective users from proceeding to create an account.

iOS downloads are down a bit at about 6-5 installs a day average for the month. The landing page and possibly the ad campaign may be due for an update.

However Android installs this month show that it's holding consistent around the ~20 installs a day mark.

Marketing

Here's the breakdown for the performance of the existing ads I have running presently.

What's New?


The automatic background check in and out of Hubs is confirmed functioning on Android 🎉

I've been polling my personal community of friends to test the features of the app and have confirmed with multiple Android users that the background geofence is now functioning to automatically check users in and out of their Hubs.

Mute Hub functionality, and also Events at Hubs!

You can now mute check in and checkout notifications on a per Hub basis. Also an early preview of events at Hubs is out and being tested.

Tech Debt Burndown 🔥

Since the official release, I've been working to ship the requested features as quickly as possible. This has resulted in improved adoption though it has also had the side effect of increasing tech debt. This is now noticeable in maintenance, feature development, & the overall quality of the user experience.

Here's what I've done this month to get on top of some of the existing tech debt.

Backend:

  • updated all software dependencies
  • Trialing APM (Application Performance Monitoring) solutions
  • Setup error monitoring
  • implement graphql data loaders to improve perf
  • Upped Postgres DB to a higher performance tier on the cloud provider
  • Setup Postgres connection pool

What's Next?

A tech debt month is well called for at this time. I want to take a month to focus on bringing up the code base quality to improve performance, & maintainability. This will help to increase the runway and hopefully the velocity of rapid feature delivery.

Here's some of the things I'm thinking to work on during the tech debt month.

Backend:

  • increase test coverage
  • resolve ongoing DB connection pool exhaustion issue
  • improve/refactor logging
  • log ingestion for post processing insights?
  • continue to trial monitoring solutions
  • proper multi-part file uploads
  • persist avatars on generation (this should result in fast and cheap loading of avatars after the initial generation in the case of a CDN cache miss)

Front end:

  • update software dependencies
  • improvements to graphql error handling
  • rework aggregated page loader approach
  • refactor to make code more maintainable
  • cleanup dead code