How I keep my app stable - Day in the life of a software developer (Building Ellie ep.6)

[Music] all right welcome back to the Vlog if you’re new here my name is Chris and I build productivity apps I usually focus on one productivity app per video So today we’re going to be focusing on Ellie a little bit of context on Ellie it’s a daily planning app and it’s basically your to-do list and calendar combined you’re someone that likes to plan your day or time box you should go check it out I think today we’re going to be doing like a day in the life type video just cuz I really miss doing these

type of videos and the main thing we got to work on today is spring cleaning for the app so first let me go over what spring cleaning is typically the way I work is I focus on you know one or two major features for the app at a time the last two major features that I focus on were the iOS widgets and the Outlook integration when I work on major features I usually have to focus really hard and a lot of smaller requests get left behind in the process what I’ve decided to do is block out 2 or 3 weeks after every major feature to just focus on these smaller requests and improvements so yeah I call this time period the spring cleaning week because we’re basically spring cleaning the app and so that’s what we’re going to be

doing today I’m going to take you guys through one of those spring cleaning days so let’s take a look at some of the things that we can work on here I obviously use Ellie to plan my day so I have a spring cleaning list here I’m just going to go through this in the feedback board and just pull things that I think we can work on today okay there’s absolutely no way we can do everything on this list but I think we can get like some of this done at least what I’m going to do is just go through one by one and just try to tackle each one of these and I think this is the order I’m going to try to tackle it too okay so let’s just get [Music] started it’s been like 30 minutes

actually got the first thing done already so Ellie has this Mac menu bar that shows upcoming calendar events so this user was reporting if you just have an Apple calendar linked it doesn’t show the event but if they linked both an apple and a Google Calendar event then the Apple event started showing up I had an idea what was going on and turned out to be the case it was a super easy fix basically the way I coded it was I load Google calendar events when that’s done I load Apple calendar events but the problem is if there are no Google events it just would never reach the Apple calendar events that’s what was going on was just like five lines of code took about like 30 minutes to figure this out so yeah bug number one fixed okay the

next thing we got to work on um it’s pretty interesting so in the web version we have this feature where you can estimate how long a task is going to take and then you can also track how long it actually took you to complete the task we show this on the task card and at the top we have the totals for all those numbers and this is great to see like you know how much work did I commit to today is it too much or is it too little so we have this feature on the web and it kind of exists on the IOS app but not really when I CED up the IOS app there’s very limited space and so I didn’t want to put those chips that we

have on the web version on the IOS app so I decided to add it very subtly on the card just to make it look less cluttered and then there is no add task button at the top with the totals instead we have this purple floating button that’s what I did on the IOS app some users have actually said we want it to function exactly like it does on the web on the IOS app I think a good compromise is to make it optional so users can turn it on if they want the IOS app to look more like the desktop app that’s what we’re going to do we’re going to Port over the feature which is not that hard and then put it under a setting so users can toggle it on and off I think I can get this done an hour so we’re going to go speedrun this okay

so made a ton of progress It’s not 100% done but it’s like 95% done and I’ll I’ll do the finishing touches tomorrow probably it took some iteration and it was mainly just trying to figure out the the colors the font the margin and everything now we have the chips on the right side of each card that show the total so again here’s the before you could see we do have the estimate in actual time but they’re kind of at the bottom of the card they’re really subtle and then here’s the new version which is basically the same as the desktop app it shows the actuals and totals on the right side way more prominent way easier to see and then we have the um the ad task card at the top instead of the

floating purple button and it shows all the totals there it’s actually a lot better than I thought I was worried it was going to be super super cluttered but I’m actually really liking this layout so I might even start using this I’m not 100% convinced everyone’s going to like this though so um instead of just okay right now I’ve decided to make it a setting and it’s off by default you go to settings you go down you can see we have a setting I also couldn’t figure out what to call the setting without being confusing I decided to make it about that task creation button so you can either choose between having it at the top with the totals or the purple floating button so you you can toggle

between them um and again it’s going to default to the purple floating button like it always is and then I also made this help center article that outlines what this is I’m going to sit on it for a day though cuz I think there’s a better way I can name this the feature is basically complete if people actually really like this and I see a lot of people switching to it I might just make this at the fall and turn off the purple floating button so that was fun working on those two things let’s go take Luna on a [Music] walk

[Music] okay just finish the walk um yeah we’re going to go check out this coffee shop downtown just go meet up with someone do some work I’m going to continue working on this stuff so that’s the game [Music] plan

[Music] okay all right so it’s the next day I was planning on filming a lot more but we ended up going to this all you can

eat sushi place for my friend’s birthday and my mind was not functioning after that so didn’t really work or film anything after that but I actually got a lot done at the coffee shop so let me walk you guys through what I was able to get done added this quick feature to the IOS app cuz it looked pretty easy now you can quickly add tasks to the app by holding down the home icon and these two buttons will appear to add a task to today or add a task to the brain D wasn’t too bad it was probably like 30 lines of code to do this the same functionality kind of exists on the iOS widget where you click the plus button there it opens the app and the creation modal pops up so leveraging a lot of the same code for that the other thing that took the B of the time was I made an

improvement to the zapier integration so if you don’t know what zapier is it’s basically a platform where you can connect apps and make automations so let’s say I change something in leie and I want to update something in notion you can use zapier to do that 3 months ago I released the first version of this integration the first version supported updating data in Ellie if something happens in another app you can do something in Ellie a great example is if you want to automate like a Shopify store or something so if an order comes in you can automatically have it create a task and Ellie with a bunch of information yesterday I decided to make an enhancement so that it supports the reverse Direction so when something happens in Ellie you can do something in

another app let’s use the same e-commerce example maybe you can set up an automation where when you complete a task it says an email to the warehouse to fulfill the order now you can connect Le to thousands of apps and it got a lot more powerful yesterday so I’m basically just going to do the same thing for the next week I’m just going to keep making these small improvements every single day even though they’re small improvements they all really add up to make this great experience I think this where I’m going to wrap the video If you like this kind of content go check out my Tik Tok and Instagram post every other day about building productivity apps obviously if you like this series don’t forget to subscribe if thank you guys so much for watching and I’ll see

you guys in the next [Music] video