Since the last update, there's been a ton of progress. Namely, I've got the publishing and deployment workflow in, and if you're seeing this, then it's working. 😉 But seriously, there are just way more edge cases when publishing like this than there are in a web application, where you're effectively controlling the posting from the app that's also serving the post. Still, the workflow feels good so far, and I'm really happy with how the app is shaping up. In fact, I was saying to my wife yesterday that, even though I'm making this for me, it's looking so good that I may actually put it out there for others.

I mentioned performance in the last post, and I did spend some time there, and got the speed in the editor much improved. As expected, there was a lot of stuff in the hot path that just didn't need to be there, making it feel more sluggish than a native app should. While the editor is the most important area, there is a lot to do in this regard throughout the app. But, as the title says, getting to MVP is the goal right now.

So what is "MVP"?

Well, since you're reading this, the obvious, most important has been achieved: being able to publish to a live website. The not-so-obvious ones include being able to publish a site that I manage for a local open space stewardship called the Waterdog Open Space Stewards. I'm on the clock for that one, because it's currently hosted at Squarespace, and costs a couple hundred dollars a year, and it renews next week. I'm looking to save that $200!

The next, biggest internal goal for MVP is my main website/blog, Scott's Thoughts. I've been running that site (or some version of my blog) for over 20 years, and it's currently a Ruby on Rails app hosted on Hetzner. It has over 1,600 posts, and is the real test for me. It's gone from hand-crafted to more recently being my playground for building my AI muscles. It's honestly in the best shape it's ever been: it's got features I've wanted for a long time, and a ton that I never even planned to actually do. But that's on the chopping block, because Herringbone is on its way. 💪

But because Scott's Thoughts is where I post regularly, and eating my own dogfood is going to get this app really into shape, that's the real MVP goal that matters.

I'm really looking forward to using this as my regular editor for posting to my site. I'm wrapping up a big refactor of the app's interface, focused on the asset management and site settings areas. Link cards and images in particular have been a big focus area—I want to make it really ergonomic to incorporate them into posts. I'm planning to add some keyboard shortcuts to make navigating the main areas of the app by keyboard. In particular, I want to make it super easy to get back to the most recent post being worked on, from anywhere in the app.

There are lots of small items I need to get working, but it feels like I'm getting pretty close to being able to dogfood this soon—a milestone I'm thinking of as "1.0 Alpha". My goal is to get my main site on Herringbone by the end of the weekend, and to get the Waterdog Stewards site live in prod before the Squarespace renewal on March 4th. 🤞💪

To-do before 1.0 Alpha

Logo

I need a logo! The logo will have to be among the Herringbone dev stories. But in the meantime, I need to settle on a color pallete, generate the pattern background, and decide on a treatment for an "H" or something to sit in front of it.

Deployment

A big epic—and honestly, the biggest potential hurdle to 1.0 alpha—is deployment. In addition to plain site generation, I want to ideally host this site at Cloudflare. And I want a seamless way to not only deploy the site (the minimum for alpha), but to incrementally deploy changes. There's a lot to do here.

Metadata

I've really cleaned up the metadata for the site that's in production now, and I don't want that to regress meaninfully when I go to prod with this app. So, I need the app to generate meta tags for canonical URL, OpenGraph/Twitter Card/etc., and other metadata that Google and other sites read.

Important, but not a blocker for 1.0 Alpha

Performance

I will soon have to look into performance; some areas of the app are feeling sluggish. For instance, typing in the title field of a post feels a little slow. And I'm not sure I need the near real-time page preview while typing in the editor, although I admit it's nice. It's not a dealbreaker for the alpha, but I need to learn how to use Instruments and get into the details.

Series

Among the last features I need to finish before considering going live with this is Series. That is, a series of related posts that will have their own index and navigation within the set of posts in the series. This is probably not strictly necessary, but it's a feature on the current site, and I'd like to use it to write up techniques and stories from developing Herringbone.

Annual Index Page

I have a pretty nice index page that breaks up posts by publication year, and I want to be able to bring that over prior to go live.