Dev Notes #5 – The Initial Wave of Feedback

In my last dev notes post, I wrote about how Monday was exhausting. Unfortunately, that feeling of exhaustion and frustration carried on for several days – up until yesterday when I finally made several breakthroughs.

Now that I've had some time to reflect, I have a clearer perspective on why I've been feeling this way.

On Monday, I sent out TestFlight invites to over 100 new users. I encouraged all of them to join the official FoodNoms Discord, and many of them did. As I wrote in my last post, I was really happy about this. It's fantastic to have this many people care enough about what I'm building.

What I wasn't mentally prepared for was the amount of feedback I was about to receive. It wasn't a crazy amount, but it was all mostly bug reports and support requests.

It's totally irrational in hindsight, but what you want to hear after you've been working on something for such a long time is "wow! this is amazing! thanks so much!" Instead the majority of the feedback was along the lines of "hey, X doesn't work" or "hey, I really want new feature Y."

Again, I was totally irrational to think this way. I think it's ultimately me projecting my feelings onto the situation. I was frustrated that I had to fix all these issues, some of which seemed really hairy.

I remember thinking at one point, "maybe it was a mistake to use Discord for feedback". But later that day I had an epiphany. It would've been *so* much more tedious and frustrating to have to go back and forth with testers over email. I hope it also encouraged more testers to share their feedback.

I was also thinking yesterday how happy I am to be experiencing these issues and feelings *now*, instead of at the actual launch of FoodNoms 2. I'm sure there will be another wave of different sorts of bugs and feature requests, and I'm sure I'll be scrambling to ship a quick point-oh-one patch release. But at least it won't be nearly as bad, and I have now set better expectations for what to expect.

Feedback has always been the lifeblood of FoodNoms development. Pretty much everything new in FoodNoms 2 came from past feature requests and/or support emails. But even several years in, feedback is still tough to receive. I suppose it's a feeling that will never go away. Just gotta keep reminding myself and channeling it into positive energy.

Maybe I'm just out of practice for doing this sort of thing and need to do it a lot more often. 😝