Stay with it.

A lot has happened with Comics Helper. Hopefully, over the next few months, I can create product updates in the blog to cover the things that have changed over the last six months. I’ve neglected to update the blog for a technical reason, which is what this post will be about.

Picking technology, focusing on the problem customers face

The way I built comics helper is that there’s a static front end and then an application front end. You’ve likely seen this before and maybe not even noticed. It looks like somesite.com and app.somesite.com. This choice has a few advantages. It means you can confidently release a blog post without worrying that something broke in the customer application and vice versa. Additionally, the marketing site can be super fast since it needs minimal javascript. Your app can load whatever javascript as customers are more forgiving around page speed than googles robots. That is why I chose this setup.

Great, what didn’t work?

Welp…

The biggest thing is that one of the tools I wanted to use had a bug. This meant that https://comicshelper.com worked but https://www.comicshelper.com wouldn’t. It also meant the HTTP -> https didn’t work correctly. I can’t reasonably focus on a marketing site when core web fundamentals don’t work. Worse still, fixing this bug wasn’t a priority for the maintainers of the framework I was using. Instead, they were working on version two of the framework. V2 would fix the bug. I was left to wait for v2 or switch plans for the front end. I chose to wait. Since I wasn’t actively trying to grow ComicsHelpers user base and rather working with the customers I have to build a great product, I can wait for the framework to fix the bug.

Dude, it’s already the 10th.
Far out.

It’s taken some time for the team to release the new version. That said, the whole app uses this framework, and I love my decision for a slew of reasons. It has meant that I’ve had to wait for SST-2 (my chosen framework) to be ready. We’re finally there. And so, here I am. Writing monthly updates again!

Starting next month, I plan to start walking through some of the features I’ve built, conversations with customers I’ve had, and what’s happened with Comics Helper lately. Thanks for reading.

Later bub!