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July Retrospective

Last month I decided that instead of posting a list of things we've done, same as what I send out in our product update email, that I'd do a bit more retrospective on how the last month went.

This particular month felt as if I wasn't getting anything done. A ton of effort was put into improving our server infrastructure, which tends to be one of those tasks that nobody actually gets to see.

With that, I'm always saying that you can't just make claims, you have to actually back them up. We promise 99.9% up time and I personally felt like our infrastructure was a bit too fragile for my taste.

While somewhat thankless tasks, these improvements are already paying of by saving our developers time as well as improving their developer quality of life.

Aside from the big infrastructure changes that had me feeling stuck in the mud, most of the other projects this month have been "polish" on what's started to feel more and more like a completed project.

For me, a project is never really "done", but there are inflection points along the way where I start to feel like time spent is experiencing diminishing returns, and focus should be put on another project, something external to the current project or a larger "moon shot" type project on the current project.

With all that "soul searching" on what I should be doing, I've ramped up customer conversations quite a bit. Rarely is somebody 100% satisfied with your product offering, and while not discouraging or anything, these conversations helped to remind me how much more there is to do on the project.

The benefit of being as nose down as I have been this month, even if I am feeling like I'm spinning my wheels, is that it's helped me put up the blinders to the competition and really get back to focusing on the things that matter (talking to customers, daily improvements, etc.)

Now that most of the hard work / heavy lifting is done on the infrastructure, I should be able to get back to more product development and marketing in August.

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