What I did this week #2
Work projects
- Building my first iPhone app, ListAssist [working title]
- Rearchitecting how data flows through the app to improve UX
- Updating UX app-wide to remove small friction points
- Finding real estate deals to invest in
- Met with some partners who could be potential commercial tenants
- Honing in on specific areas that we'll be sourcing properties in
- Built a small web app to help analyze deals (more personal software!)
Personal updates
- It's my birthday today!
- So many life changes right now. So many things to do. Spending time with family for these special days is something I'm glad I get to do again.
- Managing time and productivity
- I've been waking up at 5AM this week to get a headstart on the day. This it's been a game changer for output; I'm get an extra ~2hrs of focus time.
- But at the same time, it's been taking a toll on my sleep + mood. I need to find other ways of finding time for deep work.
Work projects detail
List Assist: A big re-architecture
- Big technical update to rearchitect the data flow through the app. The biggest change was to improve how data was being pulled from the server to minimize load times and maintain a snappy, dynamic feeling despite moving away from local storage.
- This required a big rewrite of the previous implementation of fetching data, but thanks to some killer libraries I saved a bunch of time and headache. The main ones were Tanstack Query, which to help with storing/caching data, and Zustand, which manages live states of items that I used to render the UI. These two libraries combined give an optmistic UI, that makes changes appear to happen 'immediately' on the frontend, while allowing the actual processing to take place in the background.
- Despite using those libraries, changing the existing data flows turned out to be a much larger task than I initially estimated; managing the interdependencies of when certain actions trigger other actions can be a minefield if things aren't properly documented.
On a brighter note, It feels like I'm so close to having something this product SCL (small, loveable, complete) instead of an MVP (minimum viable product). I've decided to simplify a the overall app layout which should help me get everything ready to take it to market sooner.
Property sourcing: Honing in on areas to focus on
- We met with some of our partners who would potentially be our commercial tenants in certain areas. After days like this I'm always reminded of the power of meeting face-to-face. This is how relationships are made.
- After that, I vibe coded a small Streamlit app that helps us analyze deals against our criteria much more quickly. We can now put in a postcode or address, details about the property (price, size, bedrooms, etc.) and will get back an indication if it'll be worth our time or not. Standard stuff that we'd normally use a spreadsheet for, but having a slick UI makes it much more fun.
Progress on this front is slower, but that's expected. We're patient and don't want to rush into investments, especially if we're looking further afield.
Note:
I'm still playing around with the format of these updates. While I like having a separate lengthier post for more technical details, I think I prefer a single page with the updates for the week. I may try this format going forward for a couple weeks.