Small Batches

The app posts Monday through Friday by default. My initial goal was to have one business year's worth of content loaded into the app. This way users would see new content every day. Well, I did it! Al it took was consistent effort applied in Small Batches.

I kept going through the highlighted passages of everything on my bookshelf. Discovering new terms to add to glossary. Writing bookshelf entries for all the books I've read. Listening to conversation from my own daily work that makes good fodder for the app. Keep reading new books to turn the fly wheel.

Mission accomplished! One (working) year's worth of software delivery education is complete.

Next stop: 365 total entries for anyone who wants truly daily posts.

My friends at the Flow Collective added the app to our shared slack. This is my first real installation after going to production. The app is production ready but not public yet. There are more people lined up. The waitlist page is online too. The first engagement metrics are flowing to Mixpanel. It feels great to have made this progress.

The home tab is the first step in onboarding new users to the app. The home view shows getting started instructions and pro-tips for getting the most of the app.

The app is simple enough that there isn't much interaction. It's just important to show the users how to start posting batches to channels and how to stop it.

This also gives me a way to collect feedback and interact with users.

Listener's can call +1-833-933-1912 to request episodes. I hope this encourages my listener's to engage with me in creating more valuable podcast episodes. Plus, it will bring more personality to episodes when I play listener messages. This isn't just my idea. Other popular podcasts do this too and I really enjoy it. I figured I'd bring it to my podcast. This easy to do with Twillio.

I thought myself a bit of audio production and kept iterating on the first three scripts. Then after completing a website, setting up twitter accounts, creating some basic branding with Canva, and configuring a Zap to cross promote the podcast it was launch day. I enqueued the first two episodes to post at 2 week intervals.

I wanted something different than the current offering on software engineering podcasts. They are either too long or not dense enough. Listening to two people talk about stuff isn't a good way to consistently level up your knowledge. Take a page out of the DevOps Handbook. Reducing batch size and increasing velocity is the path to growth. So Small Batches was born: concentrated episodes on software engineering theory and best practices best served over a cup coffee.

I wrote the first three scripts as a prototype. Initial feedback was positive so off I went.