LinkPeelr has been fine and dandy. So fine, in fact, that I feel a pressing need to tell you about its progress. This is a long post — sit back and enjoy!
When I started on LinkPeelr I thought it was a neat and compact idea, and a small enough project I could actually tackle myself. I ended up launching LinkPeelr after 3 weekends of work, but I never intended for it to evolve far beyond the small project that it was. From day one I viewed it primarily as a “pipecleaner”, an app that could help me test my own ability to go from problem to launch and prepare me for more ambitious things that I’ve had simmering on the back burner.
LinkPeelr was a first in many categories. It may come as a shock but it’s the first “complete” piece of software that I wrote from scratch (all 122 lines of Python and 507 lines of JavaScript). If that’s not shocking enough for you, it’s also the first piece of software that I wrote that now has thousands of users whom I’ve never met and who don’t know me and who voluntarily choose to use this software.
Needless to say LinkPeelr has quickly outgrown its purely experimental intent, managing for a few weeks to eclipse everything else I was thinking about and working on. This period has been a period of rapid learning, and something that I enjoyed immensely. Although I obviously set out to make LinkPeelr a learning experience of sorts, I never anticipated that this learning would come at this pace and intensity.
What follows is an account of what happened after I launched LinkPeelr, and what I’ve learned in the process. After hitting 1400 words with this post I realized that “what’s next for LinkPeelr” section had better come in its own separate write up.
Call me hopelessly naive about customer service, but there is something about “would you like some room for cream?” question that makes me feel good in a kind of subconscious “they care” way. Here is why I think it strikes a cord:
