In April revenue dropped to $618.01, and there was a 1.8% growth in users. Less than expected, but not alarmingly so given that we’ll be heading into the summer months soon which tend to be a time of slow down. My Alexa rank continues to climb which could be an indication that my piece of the global audience pie is still growing.

Bit by bit I’ve been able to carve out more time for Sarahsoft.

Last month I lamented not having smoke tests. I ran into a problem a few years ago when my host updated the PHP server. A function I was depending on was deprecated. As a result, one of my apps began to fail silently. Two years ago I lost 2 days after an updating a dependency changed the way the apps displayed. I’ve learned to test often, even when not updating my code. Smoke tests can automated some of that, freeing up more time for development.

At present the primary thing I’m looking for in my smoke tests is development code that slipped into production, such as code that references individual source files rather than stable build files, or specify a build file other than the current one. Although it shouldn’t effect functionality, I’m looking for code with TODOs and debugging output in production. Such conditions could be a sign that I wasn’t ready to launch the new code, and did by mistake. Maybe I forgot a task wasn’t complete, or that I needed to finish an edge case for a feature.

I haven’t gotten any more warnings about memory issues which takes some of the time pressure off. My primary goal is still moving Datayze to it’s own user account, and it’s own VM. I probably should have done this after pushing all the pending changes from the winter so that I was only working on one thing at a time. I’ve needlessly complicated things a bit for myself. Ah well, live and learn.

Posted in Work Life | Tags: Sarahsoft