November was a busy month - I went to Web Summit in Lisbon, continued work on Campfire's migration to Clerk for user auth, and fought a ton of technical fires for Trophy.
Web Summit
For the second year in a row I went to Web Summit in Lisbon with my Trophy cofounder, Charlie. We had a booth this time though and a much better grasp on what we were there to sell and how to sell it. All in all the conference felt more productive than last year's and we generated more quality leads. But it remains to be seen how many we'll convert.
My big takeaway though is that our biggest successes came from talking to founders and PMs in the specific B2C verticals that we serve (shocking, I know...) so in the future, we'll see about going to more targeted conferences around mobile apps and B2C.
Engineering Trophy for Scale
Trophy usage recently grew substantially, which brought with it a revenue bump (excellent) and novel technical challenges (not so excellent). With the increase in usage I had to introduce a Redis db into our stack and start using it for our leaderboards feature and for general caching of common expensive queries. This all started while I was at Web Summit, so the amount of time I had to learn, build, and ship these changes was quite short.
After launching the Redis DB successfully we faced our next challenge of the month: excessive bursts of API requests could degrade the performance of our database and APIs despite the fact that the excess requests were being served 429s. To solve this I spun up a proxy server to handle API auth and rate limiting and made sure all requests to our system were sent through that proxy. The proxy is set to autoscale up as needed to handle massive load, and since it doesn't connect to the production database it can scale up cheaply and without impacting our core service.
Lastly I optimized a bunch of queries and indexes across the board to keep things running smoothly.
Campfire
On the Campfire side of thing my entire focus has been on completing the migration off of MongoDB Atlas App Services (a user auth & serverless layer for MongoDB Atlas that is now deprecated) and onto Clerk. This has consumed my Campfire hours for months now and it's almost done. I need to ship it by the end of the year so I hope to get it into internal testing by the end of the first week of December.
The changes should also fix a few bugs and add a few QoL improvements that have seriously impacted UX so I'm hopeful it will be a very positive and noticeable change to Campfire despite it being mostly 'under the hood'.
December Expectations
On the Trophy side I intend to release the Push Notifications feature so we can send gamified push notifications (streak reminders, reactivation messages, usage recaps) on behalf of our customers. Plus a list of minor features and improvements that have piled up.
On the Campfire side the only goal is to ship the final update of the year, which will get all users migrated to Clerk, improve the collaboration/syncing experience, and update our core features (panels) with usability improvements and small additions.