Happy Friday,

You know how there are things you're really good at, some related things you're good at, and distant things you're bad at? I'm working on some distant things, and I'm bad at it.

In particular, I've been working on notifications. I mentioned this in my previous update, but I'm working on both push (In-app) notifications and email notifications. Typically, I'd just do one at a time, but I'm very confident a lot of farmers will prefer the emails over the push notifications. In fact, I'm pretty sure quite a few will want to do most of their work through email instead of the app.

Anyway, getting all the technology set up to send these notifications took about 2 days. Getting the first email formatted to look passable took 2 days. I have to do about 4 more of these for the initial set.

I'm not a person for a sense of design or what's pretty. In the software world, this is a running joke. "Designed by a programmer" is a common judgment, or saying it is, "Programmer art." So, writing these emails has been very hard for me. I've got something I can tolerate, so the rest will be mostly copies of that, but I think I can expect a lot more of these distant things I'm bad at to be more and more of my work.

Want an example of programmer art that I used? Well, when I was first building the app, I needed to put images in for produce items so I could get a sense of how things looked on the screen. I didn't go get pictures of the produce. I used pictures of kittens. Anywhere in the app, I needed a picture, so I used photos of kittens.

In fact, if you want to see what I'm talking about, you can look at the first-ever video I recorded of the app.

I'll keep working at this and release the new version of the app with the notifications soon. This version will be the one I market and try to get traction with. If you think there's something else missing, please let me know.

I also want to start putting in some basic application metrics and stats in future emails. If there's some data you'd like to know about how reko day is doing, just let me know!

Sincerely,

Ryan