👋
Been a while, so I have a few things to share!
Nightsky reception 🌙
I added a new project to my list back in November: Nightsky
This was a little hobby project with a simple goal/vision: show activity on Bluesky in a visual way that everyone could understand.
When I shared it on Bluesky the reception was incredible!
My initial post got over 3k likes; over 1k reposts; 300 replies; it was even reposted by the CEO of Bluesky!
But as well as all that, the site was visited by over 20k people that weekend 🤯
The surreal thing though was seeing other people post about it without referencing me at all. At that point it had grown beyond me.
I think the reason for the success it had was it's simplicity. Both in terms of how simple the goal was, but also how simple it was for anyone to understand: "each dot/star is a post happening in real time".
That made it accessible to everyone and allowed it to expand outside the bubble of "tech people".
It was also the perfect timing for it. Bluesky was going through a big growth spike and this made the activity on the network more visible, in a way validating that this social media platform is alive.
The site now only gets a few visits per day, but I'm fine with that. It doesn't need to live on forever and keep growing.
Writing & social media 🗨️
With the overwhelming success of Nightsky, I took a break from writing for my website and was focusing on Bluesky instead.
However, as that started to wind down, I struggled to get back to it. I think it was related to the success I had. It was easy to write and post things into the void, but now I had 1500 people following me, so it wasn't as easy anymore. I struggled with second-guessing any idea I had. I was putting a lot of pressure on myself.
That self-doubt has continued for the last couple of months, and still continues today. This post is a small step to overcome it.
What I'm working on 🔨
I'm working on something new and I haven't been this excited about a project for a while. It feels good!
It came from a need at work to improve the quality of our code. I was frustrated by the number of bugs we were having and wanted to do something about it. So I started building a tool to measure and track code quality for our repositories.
My goals were:
- Measure code quality on a scale
- We have a system to fail the build if certain code smells are found, but I wanted something more nuanced
- We can easily bypass this tool and disable rules, or write bad code that technically passes all the rules
- Expose our code quality as a simple number for our product manager
- That makes it easier to talk about tech debt and making sure we get it prioritised
- This also allows us as a team to track it over time and set up concrete goals to improve it over time
- Tell us (developers) where the problem areas are
- This can help us focus on our work on the problem areas
The tool is currently at an MVP stage. It's functional but needs some more work before people can use it without my support. But I'm excited to get my team to start using it and get their feedback!
Code quality has been on my mind a lot recently and the process of building this has been a lot of fun. I've learnt a lot!
I hope to make it open-source in some way in a few weeks 🤞