Hello CoRecursive newsletter subscriber,

It’s March now, and I have a new episode out here (and in your podcast player):

• ​The Story Graph with Nadia Odunayo​

Here is some of the backstory.

As I mentioned in the episode, my wife first pointed me at The Story Graph. She is big into Bookstagram, which is the self-identifying book reading corner of Instagram and The Story Graph is trendy now, she told me.

At first, I assumed that there was a big team behind the product because they’ve been covered in The Washington Post and several other prominent publications, and they have a web app, mobile apps, and a large user-base. However, it turns out I was wrong. The dev team behind the web and mobile apps was really just Nadia, with some help from her cofounder Rob on ML and Ops stuff. So I reach out to her.

But then Nadia had her doubts about an interview. We met on zoom, and she said it’s just a Rails App, not much to tell. And also, Nadia was super busy. But then I asked her about the most challenging moments in building her rails app. She pointed behind her to the bathroom and told me about sitting on the floor in the dark. She told me she was trying not to cry, and thousands of people were trying to use her site, and it wasn’t working. And then, the triumph of getting things back working again. And I was like, I need to get this into an episode.

I’m delighted with how the episode turned out, and I’m excited to have discovered what seems like, in retrospect, two prominent areas I haven’t paid enough attention to. First is product management: I have built software that works well but that no one wants, and that gap, as with Nadia’s story, can be fascinating. Second: production incidents. It’s hard to think of times when tensions run higher than when something in production is down. So let me know what you think of Nadia’s story.

Bonus Episode:

On Feb 15th, the bonus episode with Andreas Kling came out on Patreon, and I’ve gotten some great feedback on it. SerentityOS has a purity of motivation: no one is using it for anything but personal use. It’s like a personal fun side-project scaled up to hundreds of contributors. Andreas shared how that perspective is unique and intentional in the fourth bonus episode.

Other Things:

I wrote a gRPC tutorial for Earthly. In doing so, I’ve tried to capture all the problems I encountered along the way. Others will likely hit them as well, right? And with this gRPC article, that seems to have meant that the tutorial grew from 1500 words to more like 4000. I’m pretty happy with the result, and a follow-up is coming soon.

At some point, I plan to write something explaining why I’ve switched from writing Scala to writing Go. The languages couldn’t be more different, and I know the switch has shocked some podcast listeners.

Thanks, Adam

​@adamgordonbell​