It's been about one month after the first version went online. Under this baby name - under my personal website subdomain.
The baby name was xcmagg.lvido.tech. Evil spirits did it no harm.
The japanese Ainu believe that the world is filled with kamuy (spirits or deities). Because infant and child mortality was historically high, they employed this clever naming practice to trick, deter, and ward off evil spirits that brought illness or misfortune. Newborns were initially given temporary, unappealing, or even vulgar names (such as Osoma, which translates to "poop"). If a baby had a gross name, spirits would assume the child was worthless or undesirable and would be discouraged from taking them.
Bike bad luck
Last October I went for the biggest ride of the year: Caminho da Divina Providência. A 3-days 325km 6730m bikepacking trip. Epic ride - I got my elbow injured. I'm physio-rehab, so no more riding this year. Upside: more time in front of the terminal.
And I'm not alone anymore. Adan Marques is also working in this project.
Getting Advice from Reddit
Reddit is a place full of evil spirits - bots, spammers, crypto scammers etc... But once in a blue moon someone writes something good
TLDR: - Don't write code - Create products landing pages - get people interested first. - Test the demand, not the product - If you find demand, build an MVP - get it in front of people ASAP! (privatly)
Sound advice. I probably should have followed it, but I already skip steps 1 and 2. I showed XCMAGG to my friends, they liked it. One of them subscribed to the newletter. This newsletter strategy sounds like old advice. It's too late for me. But I can do step 3 or 5; IDK;
If we are about to post the link on the internet - we can't use the baby name. This is bad for the SEO! XCMAGG needs a proper domain.
RaceFeed
After a search for a cool/clever domain - like xcm.gg ChatGPT gave good arguments against clever alphabet soup domains. I came up with racefeed.com.br:
Race - ties to the XCM, or racing in general Feed - refers to this doomscroll feature called 'Feed'
And feed also can refer to nutrition (or hydration?), which are essential aspects of endurance sports. I'm happy with the name. Some may confuse it for a knockoff RaceFace from AliExpress...
Cybernetic control
This the key ideas of getting anything done. It goes by many names: OKRs, Lean, TPS The basic idea: continuously measure a system's output, comparing it to a desired goal, and make corrective adjustments. A.k.a the LinkedIn classic: "You can't manage what you can't measure"
The natural next step is to hook it up to Google Analytics; This was a mental hurdle for me. I never saw myself as a marketing / business guy, simply hooking GA into this site a mental shift.
Cyberplumbing
A good design can be victim of a poor execution. Medallion Arch is a good fit to the problem in theory - In practice the edges are fuzzy (where does bronze ends? where does silver begins? What silver can do or should do); Especially when starting Ex nihilo, without the boundaries provided by a lakehouse framework - you become the flawed demiurge of this of software - you will give bad vibes to the codebase.
Bronze was easy: get the file! But who parses the files? Bronze? (Raw+Bronze) And for Silver - What are the rules when things go wrong? What gets reprocessed? How to deal with duplicate records? Isn't it wasteful to reprocess everything?
I spent a lot of time making sure these decisions wouldn't cause me too much regret.
What's next?
Now that I have the minimum setup (Domain+GA) and the scraper gets the main sources, Up until now, every problem had a dev solution. The next set of problems are people-centric. There is little I can do as a developer, now I wear the SEO hat or Marketing Engineer hat. The focus is distribution - how to get the baby in front of users? To be frank, it's my first time - there are mental hurdles - we learn as we go.