I Couldn’t Think Of a Title

Hello everyone, it’s been a while since i’ve given you an update so I wanted to give you one 🙂

At the moment I can’t seem to catch my breath with my free time and the last month has been as manic as always. 

If it weren’t for a lack of motivation, my Grandad passed away, works been manic and I’ve been trying to buy my first home.

At work, we haven’t been able to hire as quickly as we originally hoped and being the CTO means that the additional work load falls back to me. 

That’s fine, but unfortunately if there’s a choice between paying bills and SoSa – paying bills has to take a priority.

With all that said and done, I have had some time to work on SoSa! So let’s get into it!

Profiles / Fixes

Working with React native over all has been a bit of a journey for me, so most sprints I end up refactoring code because simply I did it wrong in the first place and this sprint has been no exception

But that doesn’t mean I haven’t made progress!

Last update, we started getting the profile system in – but what use is that if you can’t actually edit your profile?

So that was my primary focus the last few weeks 

This came with a range of challenges, despite looking simple on the face of it there were a lot of moving parts to get it working. The main challenges were

• The top bar is independent of the rest of the screen (and global)
  So making the top buttons change in to different buttons whilst staying on the same screen
  
• Resetting the fields when cancel was pressed, but also maintaining the new value when you press save
  
• Saving the profile
  
• Splitting out the input fields, before the picker, date selection and text inputs were a single component and that’s not good.

All of these individually are quite simple problems to solve but as a whole it became a bit of a mess, especially when I started dealing with a very specific react issue:

https://reactjs.org/docs/hooks-faq.html#why-am-i-seeing-stale-props-or-state-inside-my-function

Thankfully I found a solution but it did require me to change how those components worked

Lore

The lore is progressing really well, and we’ve started mapping out the first major coalition, the Bureau (name tbc)

The writer has been doing a fantastic job and we’ve already got origins, descriptions and even some characters written up for The Silurus, Tursiops, Felenix and the Plorks (all names tbc)

We’re going to start moving on to the wider universe in the next sprint and aim to get cohesion across the universe, leading back into the creation story for SoSa itself.

Design

We’re also still making great progress with the UI designs, most of the main interface is now designed as well as profiles, community homes, chat, discussions etc

This design is from January, we’ve come a long way since then but there is a lag between me showing Patreons and showing the rest of the world

One thing that i’ve realised is that when I do work on the App i’m spending an awful amount of time guessing what it should look like – trying to make it polished from the start, which is probably a mistake and reducing the amount of work i’m achieving

So i’ve asked the UX/UI designer to focus on the app for the time being and I’m hoping she’ll be able to get ahead of me giving me plenty to work with and focus on when i’m building the app.

On top of the UX/UI i’ve reached out to another designer who has been working on bringing the Silurus to life!

Here are some first drafts she’s sent over, both are the wrong style but love how the designer is thinking about the species

Stats

LinkedIn grew from 884 to 897
Our Beta List grew from 408 to 414

This sprint our Average position has gone up again! going from 22.4 to 19.8!

Impressions are up from 3.26k to 4.44k and Click through is down again from 2.4% to 1.9%

Domain authority has stuck at 29!