The Steep Climb towards a better App

Some time ago, I shared that one of the planned upgrades for @snapie was a basic wallet. The idea being that if I onboard someone into the app—into @snapie—they could, if you will, graduate along with it.

In my mind, it’s one of the biggest points of friction. To be a Hivean, you have to use a few different apps, and for a newbie—someone who isn’t invested emotionally or monetarily—it might simply be too much.

As is probably obvious to anyone who follows this little blog of mine, the changes I’m making are deep cuts into the patient. I’m refactoring, cleaning up some technical debt, but also trying to make it seem like it was always there. The idea of @snapie has always been that it needs to be easy to use, and the wallet functions have to follow that philosophy.

I’m about ten pull requests deep into this quest. Trying not to break things—and also trying not to incur my brother’s wrath—I’ve been moving slowly, but steadily, for about a week. Writing tests, compiling debug versions to run on a few phones… you know, the responsible approach.

With that said, this last pull request, for one reason or another, feels like the longest—or maybe the steepest—climb. The code review AI I’m using (since my brother is probably sleeping) has been arguing with me all day. I’m 128 comments deep into this branch, and right when I think I’m one commit away, it finds two or three things to slap me back down.

Since it’s getting late and my mental sharpness is fading, I might just call it a night. But I’m close—really close—and I’m hoping to have an upgraded @snapie to share with you all as soon as next week.

–MenO