Developing Perspective

00:00:00 ◼   ► Hello and welcome to Developing Perspective. Developing Perspective is a podcast discussing

00:00:07 ◼   ► news of note, de-noise development, Apple, and the like. I'm your host, David Smith.

00:00:09 ◼   ► I'm an independent iOS and Mac developer based in Herne, Virginia. This is show number 118,

00:00:13 ◼   ► and today is Tuesday, April 9th. Developing Perspective is never longer than 15 minutes,

00:00:17 ◼   ► so let's get started. All right, so it's been quite a week for me so far, and it's only

00:00:22 ◼   ► sort of Tuesday. So what I'm going to talk about a little bit this week is kind of the

00:00:28 ◼   ► The approach I'm taking and kind of, there's a little bit of it that's crazy, some of the

00:00:31 ◼   ► things that I've been doing, and kind of why I'm doing what I'm doing.

00:00:36 ◼   ► So first off, I'm going to talk about kind of this week.

00:00:38 ◼   ► And it was just one of those strange things where a whole variety of things kind of lined

00:00:42 ◼   ► up so that I was essentially going to have three major deliveries that I was going to

00:00:47 ◼   ► try and do this week.

00:00:48 ◼   ► The first one I did yesterday, I launched Check the Weather 1.4.

00:00:51 ◼   ► I changed the weather backend and did a few other things.

00:00:56 ◼   ► It's a significant update, but not a major update probably,

00:00:58 ◼   ► I'd say.

00:01:00 ◼   ► Today, Tuesday, I launched my Recipebook 3.0,

00:01:03 ◼   ► which is an app I've been working on, honestly, for years.

00:01:07 ◼   ► It's been quite a while in making to try and get--

00:01:09 ◼   ► to decide how I was going to do sync,

00:01:11 ◼   ► to decide how I was going to do pricing,

00:01:14 ◼   ► and all kinds of things, which I'll talk about in a little bit.

00:01:16 ◼   ► And hopefully, actually, my goal is on Friday

00:01:19 ◼   ► to submit Feed Wrangler's iOS app

00:01:22 ◼   ► to the store, which is turning out to be-- we'll see.

00:01:26 ◼   ► I think it's still probably doable,

00:01:28 ◼   ► but if it turns out, those would have been

00:01:30 ◼   ► three kind of crazy things to all do in one week.

00:01:33 ◼   ► Early on Monday morning, I was thinking,

00:01:36 ◼   ► and I was like, you know, is this wise?

00:01:38 ◼   ► Am I taking on too much?

00:01:40 ◼   ► Am I doing something that's kind of foolish

00:01:42 ◼   ► by trying to do all these things?

00:01:43 ◼   ► And really, the reality I found was,

00:01:45 ◼   ► I always find it's the helpful thing to think about

00:01:47 ◼   ► of what's the worst that can happen?

00:01:49 ◼   ► What's the biggest downside?

00:01:51 ◼   ► And is it any different than the downsides

00:01:53 ◼   ► of doing things individually?

00:01:56 ◼   ► And in this case, I really didn't think that the downsides were that different by doing

00:01:59 ◼   ► it all together, that it was kind of nice to be a bit audacious, a bit ambitious, and

00:02:03 ◼   ► to try and do all these things at once, because really all of them benefit from being out

00:02:09 ◼   ► into the wild sooner and earlier.

00:02:12 ◼   ► Things like sync, where there's problems and issues and things, the longer that I can be

00:02:15 ◼   ► fixing them, the sooner that'll be the case, and the sooner I can then kind of settle that

00:02:20 ◼   ► down and hide in a bow.

00:02:21 ◼   ► And similarly with check the weather, it's like I could have held off on the update until

00:02:25 ◼   ► next week, but it only sort of helps in that the same issues are still going to be there

00:02:32 ◼   ► for the most part.

00:02:33 ◼   ► And so in the end I was saying, you know, let's be audacious.

00:02:35 ◼   ► And I think it's just as an encouragement to anyone out there, it's don't worry too much

00:02:38 ◼   ► about overdoing it necessarily, that you want to be careful obviously, but if you trust

00:02:44 ◼   ► yourself and you know your skills, you can kind of understand what are appropriate risks

00:02:49 ◼   ► for you to take.

00:02:50 ◼   ► All right.

00:02:51 ◼   ► All right, so the next thing I'm going to talk about

00:02:53 ◼   ► is the My Recipe Book launch, a little bit about My Recipe

00:02:56 ◼   ► Book more generally.

00:02:57 ◼   ► So My Recipe Book's a recipe manager,

00:02:59 ◼   ► fairly straightforward in that sense.

00:03:01 ◼   ► It's a place that you can collect, organize, catalog

00:03:04 ◼   ► your recipes.

00:03:05 ◼   ► You can put it as a grocery list, those types of things.

00:03:08 ◼   ► And the app's been around for about three years.

00:03:11 ◼   ► And it's, until now, has always been a standalone iPad

00:03:13 ◼   ► application.

00:03:14 ◼   ► It's been something that is just-- that's

00:03:16 ◼   ► the way it always was.

00:03:17 ◼   ► I built it that way.

00:03:18 ◼   ► And it always sort of just made sense that way.

00:03:22 ◼   ► Because in order for it to work on to be universal,

00:03:25 ◼   ► to be cross-platform, all those types of things,

00:03:28 ◼   ► the recipes have to sync somehow.

00:03:30 ◼   ► They have to be able to go back and forth between the server.

00:03:33 ◼   ► So if you make a change, you input a recipe in your iPad,

00:03:35 ◼   ► it shows up in your iPhone.

00:03:37 ◼   ► And that was always a little intimidating.

00:03:39 ◼   ► Because obviously, that's a fairly complicated problem.

00:03:42 ◼   ► Sync is always complicated.

00:03:46 ◼   ► There is no easy sync.

00:03:47 ◼   ► And so at first, I tried a couple of things myself.

00:03:52 ◼   ► iCloud came out.

00:03:53 ◼   ► I tried that.

00:03:54 ◼   ► None of those things had been quite right

00:03:57 ◼   ► until I took a step back and said, OK, really,

00:03:59 ◼   ► what am I trying to do here?

00:04:00 ◼   ► And I just really methodically worked it through

00:04:02 ◼   ► for a couple of weeks.

00:04:03 ◼   ► And I was able to get to a point that, yeah, OK, this works.

00:04:06 ◼   ► And I spent a couple of months testing and trying it out

00:04:09 ◼   ► and playing with it and doing all kinds of things

00:04:11 ◼   ► in the hopes of stabilizing it.

00:04:13 ◼   ► Though I will say, sync is the kind of thing

00:04:16 ◼   ► that's impossible to fully test until you deploy.

00:04:18 ◼   ► I don't think there's any reasonable way,

00:04:20 ◼   ► even with a large beta group, that you'll find all the bugs.

00:04:22 ◼   ► There are just all kinds of subtle and nuanced things,

00:04:26 ◼   ► things that relate to the nature of the user's data,

00:04:28 ◼   ► for example.

00:04:29 ◼   ► Like it's a recipe manager.

00:04:30 ◼   ► It depends a lot on how many recipes some people have.

00:04:32 ◼   ► And some people have quite a lot of recipes.

00:04:34 ◼   ► I've found several users who have several thousand recipes,

00:04:37 ◼   ► which I didn't-- I had test data sets that were that large,

00:04:41 ◼   ► but I never really thought that that

00:04:43 ◼   ► would be a realistic use case.

00:04:44 ◼   ► And it turns out that is a realistic use case.

00:04:46 ◼   ► So maybe my test data needs to be even bigger

00:04:49 ◼   ► to account for that as an edge case.

00:04:51 ◼   ► And also what I want to talk about is a little bit-- the way

00:04:53 ◼   ► I took my sync, I've had a lot of questions about if I use

00:04:57 ◼   ► iCloud, how I use iCloud, those types of things.

00:05:00 ◼   ► I ended up using iCloud for a component of my sync.

00:05:04 ◼   ► And what I ended up trying to do is try to be very pragmatic,

00:05:06 ◼   ► and look at it and say, what does iCloud do

00:05:09 ◼   ► that only it can do?

00:05:12 ◼   ► And what are things that it potentially doesn't do as well?

00:05:16 ◼   ► So first, what are some of the things that only it can do?

00:05:19 ◼   ► And on an iPhone, the simplest version of that

00:05:23 ◼   ► is it provides an avenue for ubiquitous login and user

00:05:26 ◼   ► identity.

00:05:28 ◼   ► And when you have an app with an iCloud account,

00:05:32 ◼   ► when they open that app, immediately available

00:05:34 ◼   ► is who that person is to some approximation.

00:05:37 ◼   ► And so what I started doing is, well,

00:05:39 ◼   ► I'm going to sync the user-related profile

00:05:41 ◼   ► information using iCloud to improve my user experience.

00:05:44 ◼   ► I'm going to look at it and say, hey,

00:05:45 ◼   ► if I put user information in the key value store, which

00:05:49 ◼   ► is very reliable in my experience,

00:05:51 ◼   ► I can create a great login experience.

00:05:53 ◼   ► They open up the iPad.

00:05:54 ◼   ► It says, hey, my RSP book 3.0 just launched.

00:05:56 ◼   ► Would you like to sync?

00:05:57 ◼   ► They hit yes.

00:05:58 ◼   ► It sends it off to the cloud.

00:06:00 ◼   ► They open up their iPhone and say, go to the App Store,

00:06:03 ◼   ► get the app, open it up.

00:06:04 ◼   ► And it says, hey, I noticed that you also have an iCloud.

00:06:07 ◼   ► You've already sunk with this account.

00:06:09 ◼   ► Would you like me to use this data?

00:06:10 ◼   ► They say, yes, off it goes.

00:06:12 ◼   ► And that is a really nice experience

00:06:13 ◼   ► that you can only provide with something like iCloud, where

00:06:16 ◼   ► it knows this meta information about who this person is

00:06:21 ◼   ► and about the devices that they have.

00:06:23 ◼   ► And then I take that-- all the hard part of the sync,

00:06:25 ◼   ► the recipes and grocery list and those types of things,

00:06:28 ◼   ► and I move that into my own cloud storage.

00:06:32 ◼   ► And it isn't just because of all the things

00:06:33 ◼   ► you hear about with iCloud core data syncing being complicated.

00:06:38 ◼   ► I mean, I tried a variety of different solutions

00:06:40 ◼   ► platforms. I tried some period of sync for a while. I tried, oh gosh, all kinds of different

00:06:45 ◼   ► approaches. And in the end, what I kept coming down to is I wanted to own the sync, not necessarily

00:06:50 ◼   ► because that makes my life easier, but because that makes my product better. Let me unpack that

00:06:56 ◼   ► a little bit. Any time that you take something as sort of crucial as sync and put it into a third

00:07:03 ◼   ► party's hands, whether that could be anything, it can be iCloud, it can be some period, it could be

00:07:07 ◼   ► It could be Winder Azure services.

00:07:12 ◼   ► I think there's a new thing that Matt Thompson released

00:07:16 ◼   ► as part of his AF incremental store backend.

00:07:19 ◼   ► There's all kinds of approaches you can take.

00:07:24 ◼   ► Anytime you do that, the difficulty you run into is

00:07:26 ◼   ► how easily, if at all possible, is it for you to fix problems,

00:07:29 ◼   ► bugs, inevitable things that will come up.

00:07:33 ◼   ► And usually whenever I was looking at most of these solutions,

00:07:35 ◼   ► the tricky part is a lot of it's a black box.

00:07:38 ◼   ► You take this data and you put it in there

00:07:39 ◼   ► and you hope it works.

00:07:41 ◼   ► Which if it works, is great,

00:07:42 ◼   ► but it's never gonna work 100%.

00:07:44 ◼   ► You have to kind of assume that it can do work

00:07:46 ◼   ► a lot of the time, but it's never gonna quite be 100%.

00:07:49 ◼   ► So what do you do in the weird edge cases?

00:07:51 ◼   ► What do you do in the cases where the user

00:07:53 ◼   ► has some strange configuration, some strange thing,

00:07:57 ◼   ► weird connectivity, running through a weird proxy

00:07:59 ◼   ► that is messing with the data?

00:08:01 ◼   ► What do you do in that case?

00:08:03 ◼   ► And a lot of times the answer for a lot of the platforms

00:08:05 ◼   ► I looked at were, there's not really that much you can do.

00:08:08 ◼   ► You can ask them to re-sync maybe,

00:08:09 ◼   ► you can hope it's not destructive.

00:08:11 ◼   ► But the reality is, what I love,

00:08:13 ◼   ► is over the last two days,

00:08:15 ◼   ► I've been able to go into the database,

00:08:17 ◼   ► oh, go into the app, I can look at exactly what's going on.

00:08:20 ◼   ► I can go through the server logs, I can replay stuff.

00:08:23 ◼   ► I can look at it and be like, okay, this is the problem.

00:08:25 ◼   ► Here's the thing that I need to fix.

00:08:27 ◼   ► And the reality is, I think that makes

00:08:28 ◼   ► my product a lot better.

00:08:29 ◼   ► makes my customer experience a lot better.

00:08:32 ◼   ► For example, I had a customer who had a particular data

00:08:35 ◼   ► corruption bug that was pretty subtle and worked its way in.

00:08:38 ◼   ► And I was able to go into his account, look in the database,

00:08:41 ◼   ► tweak a few records, a couple of things that were wrong,

00:08:44 ◼   ► and then I can send him an email and say, hey,

00:08:46 ◼   ► your account's fixed.

00:08:47 ◼   ► Next time you open the app, it'll be working fine.

00:08:49 ◼   ► And that's just awesome to be able to reach into their life

00:08:52 ◼   ► and do that for them.

00:08:54 ◼   ► And so I highly recommend-- at the end of the day,

00:08:56 ◼   ► it's a hard thing to say if someone says,

00:08:58 ◼   ► oh, I've been thinking of doing my own, what should I use?

00:09:01 ◼   ► Well, I can say that I can build my own

00:09:03 ◼   ► because I'm an experienced Rails developer.

00:09:06 ◼   ► Before I did iPhone development,

00:09:08 ◼   ► I was a full-time professional consultant doing Rails work.

00:09:11 ◼   ► I sort of knew my way around that world.

00:09:13 ◼   ► And it's a hard thing to learn.

00:09:14 ◼   ► I'm not saying it's impossible,

00:09:16 ◼   ► but the reality is you wanna kind of work your way up.

00:09:19 ◼   ► And if maybe you just tackle problems at an easier level

00:09:22 ◼   ► if that's something that's above you.

00:09:24 ◼   ► But it's really complicated

00:09:25 ◼   ► if you're taking your core business value

00:09:28 ◼   ► and putting it in someone else's hands.

00:09:30 ◼   ► It's just something I get very nervous about.

00:09:32 ◼   ► And as I've gone through this, that's

00:09:34 ◼   ► kind of where I settled on it.

00:09:35 ◼   ► One thing I did about the launch that I thought

00:09:37 ◼   ► was also interesting worth mentioning

00:09:39 ◼   ► is I did what I call a soft launch in the sense

00:09:42 ◼   ► that I released the app to the update, to the store,

00:09:45 ◼   ► before I started publicizing it, before I had people

00:09:48 ◼   ► in the press talk about it.

00:09:49 ◼   ► But the hope that I can kind of gradually work out,

00:09:52 ◼   ► A, does my server infrastructure scale,

00:09:54 ◼   ► and B, does my server architecture, does my sync,

00:09:57 ◼   ► does all these little different components,

00:09:58 ◼   ► do they actually work?

00:10:00 ◼   ► Do they actually gonna do what I think they should do?

00:10:03 ◼   ► And it was kind of fun when I hit update,

00:10:05 ◼   ► release to the store, and then I can go into my server logs,

00:10:07 ◼   ► I can tail all the production logs,

00:10:09 ◼   ► and I can look at it and say,

00:10:10 ◼   ► and just watch the first user create an account and log in,

00:10:14 ◼   ► and make sure everything works.

00:10:16 ◼   ► And then you say there's two people, and there's three people

00:10:18 ◼   ► and this kind of gradually building process is great

00:10:21 ◼   ► to making sure that everything worked.

00:10:23 ◼   ► In the end I'd say it has kind of worked out really well.

00:10:24 ◼   ► My server infrastructure that I was kind of building,

00:10:26 ◼   ► I think I've talked about a couple of times

00:10:28 ◼   ► where I have a couple of line nodes arranged,

00:10:32 ◼   ► running rail servers with a Postgres backend

00:10:35 ◼   ► and a load balancer in the front,

00:10:37 ◼   ► and it ended up working great.

00:10:38 ◼   ► And the experience I had,

00:10:40 ◼   ► which I think I'd mentioned also,

00:10:42 ◼   ► where I had practiced building up and tearing down servers

00:10:45 ◼   ► was also really helpful,

00:10:46 ◼   ► 'cause I found that my original configuration

00:10:49 ◼   ► had two front ends and it looked like I needed three.

00:10:52 ◼   ► I was able to, in about 10, 15 minutes,

00:10:54 ◼   ► spin up a new server, deploy it,

00:10:56 ◼   ► sort of go through this sort of checklist,

00:10:57 ◼   ► and in the end it worked flawlessly,

00:11:00 ◼   ► and it's been great working ever since.

00:11:03 ◼   ► And so that kind of a soft launch can, I think,

00:11:04 ◼   ► be really effective if you can allow yourself to do that.

00:11:09 ◼   ► One way to do that, even if you're launching a new app

00:11:11 ◼   ► that you can kind of think about,

00:11:13 ◼   ► is to set the app to release the night before

00:11:18 ◼   ► you're expecting any kind of, sort of the big hit,

00:11:20 ◼   ► the big publicity, the big promotion.

00:11:22 ◼   ► You can release it the night before,

00:11:25 ◼   ► and kind of trickle it out,

00:11:27 ◼   ► maybe reach out to a few friends,

00:11:28 ◼   ► kind of see if you can build a little bit

00:11:31 ◼   ► of actual production experience

00:11:33 ◼   ► without actually having to sort of push it out

00:11:36 ◼   ► and then have this big sort of stampede

00:11:38 ◼   ► of people working on your app, hopefully.

00:11:41 ◼   ► It sort of avoids a bit of the problem

00:11:42 ◼   ► if you think about it, like the mailbox

00:11:44 ◼   ► or these apps that have been having all this weird,

00:11:45 ◼   ► having to take strange tactics to avoid scaling problems.

00:11:49 ◼   ► One of the things that I think about

00:11:50 ◼   ► is how it's just like trying to sort of slowly

00:11:53 ◼   ► the faucet on would be a great way to do it.

00:11:55 ◼   ► So that's something that I've tried, seemed to work, and I'm pretty happy with.

00:12:02 ◼   ► So where does that put me now?

00:12:03 ◼   ► So that's the next thing that I'm working on then is feed wrangler, to turn that around

00:12:08 ◼   ► and to hopefully ship three things in a week.

00:12:12 ◼   ► And feed wrangler's kept going well, it's getting pretty close.

00:12:14 ◼   ► And what I actually really liked about the timing of this is I've been able to prove

00:12:18 ◼   ► and verify my server infrastructure approach.

00:12:22 ◼   ► under a fairly reasonable load with my recipe book

00:12:26 ◼   ► that I can now just immediately take that information.

00:12:28 ◼   ► I've learned a whole bunch of lessons.

00:12:30 ◼   ► There are some, even the simple examples

00:12:32 ◼   ► are some of the things that I wasn't indexing

00:12:34 ◼   ► some of my data correctly in the database

00:12:36 ◼   ► and I've found these performance bottlenecks immediately

00:12:39 ◼   ► when it's, when you have thousands of people

00:12:41 ◼   ► hitting it all at once, they become much more apparent

00:12:43 ◼   ► than when it's just you and your test data

00:12:45 ◼   ► from, there's only so many concurrent connections

00:12:47 ◼   ► that you can really simulate.

00:12:50 ◼   ► And so when I started using this real data,

00:12:51 ◼   ► I was like, oh, here's some indexes I'm missing,

00:12:53 ◼   ► here's some things I need to tweak.

00:12:55 ◼   ► I'll go into Postgres, do those changes,

00:12:57 ◼   ► and then it's awesome.

00:12:58 ◼   ► I use New Relic RPM server monitoring,

00:13:01 ◼   ► which gives you essentially throughput,

00:13:04 ◼   ► request per minute, response time, error rate,

00:13:06 ◼   ► those types of information for a Rails app.

00:13:08 ◼   ► I think it can work for a variety of servers.

00:13:10 ◼   ► But I use it, I don't usually,

00:13:11 ◼   ► I'm not necessarily gonna keep it in the long run.

00:13:14 ◼   ► It's something that I tend to use targetedly,

00:13:15 ◼   ► 'cause any time you instrument your app

00:13:17 ◼   ► and do a lot of monitoring,

00:13:19 ◼   ► there's gonna be a performance hit

00:13:20 ◼   ► that you're taking as a result.

00:13:21 ◼   ► But right up front, it's always great,

00:13:23 ◼   ► because it helps you quickly identify these bottlenecks

00:13:25 ◼   ► that you can then very quickly attack.

00:13:29 ◼   ► There was, I think, a post at a chart on app.net.

00:13:32 ◼   ► There was this crazy call where I

00:13:35 ◼   ► was able to take the average response time

00:13:38 ◼   ► and cut it into about a third of what it was before,

00:13:41 ◼   ► just by adding a few key indexes to the database.

00:13:44 ◼   ► Any time you can do those kind of wins,

00:13:45 ◼   ► it's just kind of amazing, because it

00:13:48 ◼   ► feels like black magic.

00:13:49 ◼   ► It's like what you had before was working, it was correct.

00:13:53 ◼   ► You add a little bit of something to it,

00:13:55 ◼   ► and then all of a sudden it works so much better.

00:13:57 ◼   ► And so that was kind of exciting to see,

00:13:59 ◼   ► to be able to experience in a production environment,

00:14:03 ◼   ► and to know that was improving customers' interactions

00:14:06 ◼   ► immediately.

00:14:08 ◼   ► And so that's kind of where I am.

00:14:09 ◼   ► It's been kind of a crazy week.

00:14:11 ◼   ► I know I've gotten a lot of questions,

00:14:12 ◼   ► but I'm not sure I answered them all.

00:14:14 ◼   ► It's been kind of crazy in terms of stress and worry, too.

00:14:18 ◼   ► So it's just kind of, if I didn't answer a question

00:14:21 ◼   ► that you had about kind of these launches I've been doing,

00:14:24 ◼   ► just the best place is probably gonna be email me,

00:14:26 ◼   ► david@developingperspective.com,

00:14:27 ◼   ► and I can try and loop back on another show,

00:14:29 ◼   ► just to make sure I hit 'em all.

00:14:31 ◼   ► But otherwise, it's a busy week, exciting,

00:14:33 ◼   ► lots of fun stuff, and I really appreciate

00:14:34 ◼   ► you listening to the show.

00:14:36 ◼   ► So yeah, so that's it.

00:14:37 ◼   ► As always, questions, comments, concerns.

00:14:39 ◼   ► I'm on Twitter @_davidsmith, appnet @davidsmith,

00:14:42 ◼   ► david@developingperspective.com.

00:14:44 ◼   ► Thanks, happy coding, and I'll talk to you later.

00:14:46 ◼   ► Bye.

00:14:47 ◼   ► [