Busy busy busy... so much data!
Short update this week :)
Every two weeks, I share my notes on building Shepherd.com. Shepherd makes exploring and discovering new books fun (while helping authors get their books in front of the most likely readers). Please join us as a founding member if you want to support us.
Summary: February 27th to March 10th
It has been a bit INSANE at Shepherd 🤪. I have so much toder to clean up genre and age data. It can feel a bit overwhelming at times. Starting next week, I will spend 1 to 2 hours every morning prepping everything. If I can do this for all of March, we should be able to launch everything in mid to late April.
Here is a quick summary of what happened over the last two weeks:
We are getting closer to finishing the design for the updated bookshelves (this update will add genre, age, and more). We must finish this work in 2 to 3 weeks as this is our developer's next batch of work. I have to finish the spec for the developer and do more mobile user testing.
Marton started implementing book series data on our backend systems. We decided to do this now since we are running late on the updated bookshelf design.
Roman (our new part-time designer) is working on creating book series pages for the frontend. We will add these pages to the website in a few months.
I spent 20% of my time cleaning up genre data and learning from it this week. I am only 5% done with this work. It is a lot of complex decisions about how to categorize things.
I spent 20% of my time working on design and dev specs. I am trying more of a backlog over the three months, so we always have ready the next batch of work. It will take 2 to 3 months to build out a better backlog of work on the development side.
I spent 20% of my time this week on marketing. This week was a lot of grunt work as I improve how systems work, crunch random data, and started getting ready for an official launch of Shepherd (I will take the beta tag off in April once we launch our new bookshelf pages and add genres/ages to the website!)
The rest of my time is spent helping authors, responding to emails, and all the little stuff that keeps us chugging along.
What is going on outside of Shepherd?
Spring is here!!! I am excited about warmer, sunnier weather and more outdoor bike rides soon :)
What am I reading?
I am reading Bellatrix, book 2, in a historical fiction series by Simon Turney. It is about the Roman legion in Egypt so far (Legion XXII). I read a lot of historical fiction, and it is nice to get out of the typical Ancient Rome hangouts.
Thanks, Ben
P.S. A late winter ride in Northern Portugal :)
