May 2020 — End of Month Update
Hi everyone 👋
Another month down.
A lot has been happening behind the scenes lately, and NativShark is in a much better place than it was in April.
We reached and pushed through an inflection point in May, and took our project management to a whole new level.
Our workflow and efficiency has been vastly improved. Certainly, this has been the best month for us as far as getting problems solved and progress made. Morale is high.
While we are still some time out from the Phase One launch, we are moving confidently towards being ready for community testing, and then release.
Insight
As the company has continued to grow and evolve, especially at the pace that it has, we’ve had to learn to adapt on the go. We knew we would have to make changes to our operations as we entered May with our second major delay.
Hitting these kinds of inflection points in the growth of a company is one of the most exciting parts of building a company in the first place, so we were ready for the challenge that the circumstances were asking of us.
Our changes revolved around project management, mindset, and team procedures. This is not an exhaustive list of everything we’ve adjusted this month, just some of the interesting parts.
Project Management
We’ve used OneNote as our collaboration center for a long time, which worked great as a small team, but we’ve now most certainly outgrown the need it originally filled. We are now using Notion for collaboration, which is a fully featured documentation tool, instead.
OneNote left a lot of things to be desired, but some of the most notable negatives about it was that it became quite unorganized very quickly, and we had to deal with very slow syncing when working with other team members. On top of that, the many save/sync conflicts were becoming too much to deal with.
Notion, on the other hand, is exactly what we need with its ability to organize, document, and collaborate in real time easily.
With this adaption to Notion, we’ve also improved our documentation standards and processes. It’s now much easier for anyone in the company to find what they need to find, document their work, and create proper feature specifications. This not only helps us keep our problem-solving approaches consistent now, but makes on-boarding new team members significantly faster.
Procedures & Mindset
Being fully remote while adjusting to life under quarantine, we’ve had to learn what the “new normal” looks like for NativShark. We’d love to get everyone back under the same roof working together, but we know that it will be some time until that will be a reality.
As such, we’ve pulled up our bootstraps this month and really settled into making the best of what we have, working hard and having fun together regardless.
We’ve improved our expectations and guidelines with remote working to help us still feel the team bond despite the distance.
One thing that helped improve this feeling of team connectedness is Discord introducing video call right in a voice channel. This has let us easily stay on camera together while working and still be in our favorite communication platform where we already were, so there’s no extra steps to staying in touch with the team. This small change has led to spontaneous collaboration being just that much more possible, like it is when you’re in the same room together.
All of these new changes in project management, team workflow, and mindset are part of a healthy growing company and it feels great to be coming across these challenges and coming out on the other side with a new outlook. It gives us confidence in the quality of the product we’re delivering.
~ Caleb
Content
Ty here!
At the time of writing this, we have finished entering all of the Phase One lessons into the NativShark editor, and I am currently going through a second pass to ensure formatting, use of elements, and many other things are all in order.
Since the editor was still under big-time development when I first entered the lessons, this second pass is absolutely essential. During the first pass I had many, many bug reports to fill out :D
Once I’m done, we’ll still need extra passes from Niko, Rei, and me again to make sure the content is well-explained and accurate, and at least one pass from Caleb and Jacob too, who will ensure the technical aspects such as spacing, position and colors are up to par.
While the editor still has a few features to be completed, and bugs to be squashed, there are lessons that are essentially fully complete.
All that said, I’d like to show off how one of our lessons looks while taking a peek at how the editor works (this is the tool I get to use everyday 😃):
While the lion’s share of effort is completed at this point, there are several important things that still need attention on the content side. Some of them are as follows:
- Finish appropriate amount of passes through content to ensure quality
- Upload Dialogues and format them properly
- Finish improvements to the kanji system
- Wrap up Extra Credit and Using NativShark lessons
- Get the audio uploaded for sentences and dialogues
- Set / Fix remaining literals and furigana (along with in-line furigana in lessons)
- Finalize formatting documentation which will allow for true completion of lessons
~ Ty
Development
Hey, Jacob here from the development team!
We’ve been hard at work not only on the platform, but also on our internal procedures.
A couple of our major focuses, aside from the primary goal of finishing Phase One, have been fixing some glaring issues in our existing codebase (making it more manageable) as well as standardizing our approach to development and re-allocating our resources.
On the backend, we’ve made great strides in simplifying the codebase by reducing repetitious code and moving things out of Elixir and into SQL where it makes sense.
In addition to the refactor, we’ve also finished the progression system (this one is a beast! We’ll need to write on this in detail sometime 😅), notification system, and various things around GDPR compliance. We are in the final stretches now and are adding various aggregators that allow everyone to see all of their juicy stats.
The frontend has also been making good progress.
Resources have now been primarily allocated to the admin tools to wrap them up and allow the content team to add the finishing touches to all of the lessons, Dialogues, and flashcards you’ll be working through.
As Caleb mentioned, everything leading up to this month has been incredibly eye-opening. We’ve been working hard to fix the internal processes that were in place to allow us to more effectively manage our tasks, internal deadlines, and collaboration with one another.
There’s a quote that I’d like to leave everyone with that I think drives home why all of our changes have been necessary:
… customer solutions are only as good as the business processes that produce them.
We want to deliver an experience that fundamentally alters the way languages are learned. And that requires a better business process than we have had up to this point.
We’re even more motivated and excited than ever.
As always, we can’t wait for everyone to get their hands on what we are building.
