18 The home straight

There comes a point in a project where it dawns that the end is close, but the activity seems to ramp up.

The project has been going for years, and I have been determined that the product will not be released until everything is complete. In early 2023, I thought that the product was complete except for the translations, so I offered it to a few people to try out. However, I got so stressed out with each bug I found after that, that I went into a panic to fix them real quickly. After a few weeks, and with nobody trying it out, I cancelled the licenses.

Soon after that, I spent six weeks developing the sequence element and various other improvements. The next year and a half was about making everything look and work smoother than before. Yet as I was feeling that the product was so close to release, instead of things slowing down and getting all the other ducks in a row ready for release, I was overhauling the operation of some parts, involving streamlining of the CSS and XSL. Perhaps I was procrastinating, but it felt like I needed to really get the product in shape, ready for prime time, and that that was soon.

After working on the product for years, with so many overhauls, it seemed that there was nothing much to do except casually release it. In projects, we can underestimate the time required for what seems like the last 20%, but that usually stretches out because there are always a lot of unforeseen loose ends that finally need tying off to actually complete the project. That is the home straight, where it just seems like the end is in sight, and there is just a small way to go.

One of the last things was the translations, but with them only taking a couple of days, instead of release being weeks away, it was suddenly days. I had had a sense in August 2024 that my birthday in mid September could be the release date, I tried pushing FastSpring to make it so. Unfortunately, the first attempt at the identity check failed because i used a screenshot for one of the criteria, but they did not tell me which. So I had to go through the fiddly process of taking real-time pictures of myself and driver's license, rather than the clean images of them I had originally submitted.

Unfortunately, the store activation did not come in time for my birthday, but I released it a couple of days after with an announcement on LinkedIn. Not having a large following there, just because I did not really do much posting, I got only dozens of looks, but strangely no congratulatory comments. What I found interesting was that I was feeling strangely disconnected from the product. While I came across still more things to correct, I was not feeling panicky like I had over a year earlier. The product was now its own life, and I was just helping it along instead of being its sole guardian.

Perhaps reflecting my newfound relationship to the product, I had what I call a rational dream, being that instead of worrying about some perceived bug in the product, and rushing to try and fix it, I dreamed about adding some functionality. I then thought about what it would look like, and compared it to some existing functionality, but finally decided that it was not necessary. All this happened in the dream, but used exactly the same relaxed thought process that I would use when I thought about new functionality when awake. This is the first time I ever had such a dream.

I am now pondering the next stages, being that of promotion and getting reviews. I had looked at ways of getting reviews earlier, like with Ars Technica and ZD-Net, but there seemed to be no formal avenues to submit products for reviews with them, so I let it slide until now. Not feeling rushed due to that disconnected feeling, but I am expecting that there must be some way to get them. After all, YouTube vloggers are doing reviews, but it seems like major manufacturers can somehow contact them, but us small fry cannot. Fortunately, ChatGPT came up with a few suitable YouTube channels.

While we like to think we are finished, some of the changes occurring after the official release were:

a.Redesigned the session management to use AES-256-GCM, while also enabling full use of the browser's navigation buttons.
b.Redesigned, again, parts of the login and session management to facilitate true multi-login to guest accounts so anybody can look at all available pages without interfering with each other.
c.Implemented buffered transfer of code versions from the license server to reduce memory usage.
d.Reduced the bottom matter text about cookies and external links to a link to a SD privacy page describing what the product does with them, and statistics and user data, on sites using it. Same link on the login pages instead of the cookie notice.
e.Eliminated the bulkier of two internal element path descriptors used during editing, which while for different purposes, could be easily converted between each other, making one unnecessary.
f.Added generation of a stats.txt file at the same time as the sitemap.xml file. It contains numbers of a site's public entities with a view to building a facility to show the total numbers for all sites using the product.
g.Dialled down the visual artifacts of an unregistered domain.
h.Fixed several bugs and anomalies.

As no one had bought the product at the time of these changes to know what had been before, I just updated the release notes version without detailing what had been changed.