Been a minute. Let’s go.

Blog has been gone for a while. Bullies galore. Nuked everything and spent time in the gym, focusing on what matters. Starting again. Fresh. So let’s go (wait, I just said that). Short sentences galore — yeah, sorry, didn’t know how to start.

Tinylytics

This has been my biggest and most successful project to date, and it’s turning into a full time job — even though it’s not making quite enough to sustain me as a full time commitment. But you know, it’s worth it. It has momentum, and a great user base. Thank you to all.

I’ve been blogging a lot about the changes throughout the months, always in motion.

Over the months I’ve been receptive of integrating features for small agencies which I keep working on. It always feels nice to make it better for a few folks that use it. I love shipping.

Part of me thinks I lost the original vision of what makes Tinylytics what it is, for the small corner of the web — not the “indie” corner, but your corner — from small side blogs, to side projects to bigger than life things.

Slowly I’ve been working on making a better experience for everyone and bringing some nice small UI changes to make it unique and not so “same” as everything else I touch. It’s a long road and I want to correct any mistakes I’ve made over the last few months that made it more like a polished “everything else I see”.

Funny enough, I created a podcast episode that I never edited or published just the other day, which helped me set things into perspective about the future of Tinylytics. One step at a time though, now that I nuked everything.

I recently, just yesterday, have gone back to using my original payment provider, Paddle. I had some trouble at the beginning when first launching with them, and that left a sour taste in my mouth. Two years later, I have gone back and I am real happy with it. Still work to do, but I know it’s a better experience overall — not just for my users, but also for myself — everything just seems to work. I won’t go into details, but my experience with Lemon Squeezy (the provider I used after Paddle) has been nothing but downhill. It’s like that first crush you have, everything seems perfect... and then time goes on and there are a lot of paper cuts... checkouts that error or load in more than 20 seconds — no thank you. Anyway, I’ll spare the details — perhaps I’ll edit that podcast one day so you know.

The other day I was looking at some “competitors” — I know, that’s not like me. I like just doing my own stuff. Seeing what I saw I know what I am going to do next, but that probably won’t come for a while. The one thing I will mention is this notion of hit limits and retention of hit data — just dumb. Everyone does it. Maybe there is a better way. Why choose how many hits you want? Perhaps just keep it dynamic. I don’t know, watch this space I guess.

Oh, and I am experimenting with a new email provider to send transactional email and perhaps also expand into newsletters and some other cool stuff. It’s called Bento, and is created by Jesse. He’s an independent developer based in Japan. I’ve been following him on X and I just kinda fell in love of what he does. So here I am. Watch this space I guess.

Anyway, I just wanted to kick start this blog again and was hoping to share a few things without going into too many little things.

Micro.blog

I am in the process of upgrading the main React Native app to newer versions of it. It’s been a long road and I am finding a lot of issues with older packages as we have to adhere to certain rules for keeping up to date with supported Android versions set out by Google. It’s not perfect but I am enjoying the process.

There are opportunities to revisit some logic and perhaps packages that we could just write ourselves. If you look at the current work in progress branch you will notice I am working with Expo now also. The reason for that is that I’ve worked on a few “Expo first” projects over the past months — it’s well supported and all the packages are generally maintained all the time. So I like leaning towards using it more.

Next up, we’ve shipped some privacy changes to the way your profile shows up on the Micro.blog side. I enabled both these options now.

Manton has been hammering out updates over the past few months — I have no idea how he does it, but you know — it’s amazing. Check the news blog to see what’s going on.

Funny enough, I take a break from working on the web project at times, and each time I pull there are multiple of hundreds of commits even just a week or two apart.

Inspirational energy!

Other projects

Another time.

Closing notes

NEVER let other people make you loose that fire that keeps you going. Say NO. Keep going. Keep fighting. Do your thing. NEVER care of what others think of you. It might take time, but just keep fucking going!

All that to say, maybe see you around again.

Peace, love. Until next time ✌️❤️