Projects and Updates, 2019-07-01

For the last 3 months, I've definitely spent more time playing tennis than designing or coding. It's been great.

Playlist of music in this post: Spotify

App Updates
I've been using my Invitation Managing/Event Planning app more than I've been designing and building it, which is great... that means the software is working well. It's working so well, I've generated too much data to manually sort through all of it; as a result, my recent updates focused on making the data easier to manage.

Events in reverse chronological order
I've always had ambitions of creating an interface that would allow me to archive events; archiving events, in turn, would process final attendance statistics. To encourage this work, I intentionally listed my events in chronological order: my very first entry -- almost 11 months ago -- has always been the first event one sees when viewing the events list.

My rationale: building the archiving interface needed to get done, and if I happened to delay the work so long that scrolling to the bottom of the list became annoying, it would incent me to finally build the archiving interface.

The scrolling did, indeed, get annoying; however, building the interface did not need to get done. It's a cool idea and, as of today, its absence has no material impact on how I use the software or how efficiently it helps me invite people to events.

I updated a single SQL command, my events view has the most recent entry first, and now my life is much better.

Filtering Contacts
When there were very few people in my database, I could glance at all of my contacts, remember which ones are into board games (for example), and then decide which of the board gamers I wanted to invite to a particular event.
My contact list has grown large enough that it's finally difficult to do all of that work in my head. In response, I added an interface that allows me to limit my contact view to a particular tag when I'm adding people to an event.

Mass Adding Contacts to Tags
This update is still in progress.
Today, if I add a new tag to the database, and I want to associate 19 people with that tag, I have to navigate to 19 separate profiles and add the new tag to each person's profile. I'm working on an interface to add people en masse to a tag; in the above example, from a list of all my contacts I would select the 19 I want added to the tag and save.

Leaving Amazon
My first Amazon purchase was May 20th, 1998.^[1]

For reasons^[2], I'm removing Amazon from my life as much as I can.^[3] The only thing left is transferring my train-finding Alexa skill to Google Assistant, so I can get rid of my final Alexa device.

Part of me is loathe to officially close my actual account, since I have 20+ years of shopping history saved there. On the other hand, "20+ years of shopping history saved there" is a horrifying phrase and it needs to die. On the other other hand, I'm not even sure it's possible to close an Amazon account, and I certainly recognize that closing my account probably doesn't delete that history.
¯\(ツ)/¯

My last Amazon purchase was January 9, 2019.

Five Albums
1, The Beatles
Czarface Meets Ghostface, Czarface and Ghostface Killah
My Finest Work Yet, Andrew Bird
Oxnard, Anderson .Paak
When I Get Home, Solange Knowles

Featured songs: Spotify