Less coding in public, sorta

This week has been a massive clusterfuck of stress in personal life (nothing terrible nor permanent, don't worry), so I only had time to dash off a quick note for Thursday's subscriber post. AND IT'S ALSO LATE!! 🤯. I feel shame.

Gonna follow up a bit on the post from 2 weeks ago about me wanting a random-meetings-in-a-group software thing.

First: I think I got the most reader response in the comments of this newsletter... ever? It's like that adage about how if you want the right answer from the internet, confidently post a wrong answer. But still the conversation was really helpful. (Also learned that Ghost has a been a great CMS platform for my writing but it has utter garbage for comment management features.)

A few people fairly pointed out that I haven't really stated my problem statement before diving into technical details. Amusingly, I have to say the exact same thing at work all the time when I sit in my UX Researcher seat meetings. I'm going admit that y es the problem is a bit vague. It's much clearer in my head and I didn't articulate it, but still, fair criticism.

What's interesting though is that someone actually pointed out there existed a product offering that comes VERY CLOSE to what I want – Random Coffee. I hadn't heard of them before, but they actually aimed at the exact problem I was trying to solve, albeit they added some useful abstraction to generalize the product more. So, yay, it's at least validation of my problem and potential solution?

But here's the interesting part, in their pricing page, under the $0 free tier, calendar integration is a "Coming soon" feature. Meaning that whole mess of figuring out how to integrate with gcal/ical/outlook/whatever, or build in automatic video-conferencing links is a hard enough problem that even a company (of unknown size and funding) punted on the problem.

For paid offerings it seems they integrate with "HRIS" systems? I think that means HR Information Systems, so essentially your ActiveDirectlry/LDAP/whatever? Under a unified IT ecosystem like within a company, it's much easier to solve all those integration issues – they have integrations for MS Teams and Slack. Even if that doesn't work, it seems the product can just send emails to pairs of people that tells people to go figure out the scheduling problem themselves.

Anyways, now that there's an existing offering that has a free trial thing... Maybe I'll work with some folk on discord and give it a shot first, see if rolling my own thing is actually worth doing or not. Either way, continue to give me feedback as I vent these thoughts out of my brain!

Thanks to everyone who has and kept me from running blindly into the dark forest of writing code!

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