Touchgram’s new Core Engine & a long year

A technical and cautionary tale for startups

This is mostly about engineering decisions and an overall look at how Touchgram works under the hood. If you’re a startup founder or engineering manager, you may find it schadenfreude-ingly entertaining or instructive.

There’s been a long year of work on the core engine of Touchgram. This article talks about why so much time went into it and the decisions along the way. Consider it a very long-winded apology for people who’ve been waiting for something more exciting, and usable.

It can serve as a cautionary tale on how a couple of strategic decisions mushroom into a ton of work.

Here’s the simple path to a year of development. Well-intentioned, clear goals but a horribly underestimated cost. In the process, Touchgram’s grown to over 38K lines of code, from about 16.5K non-blank lines at the time of v1.2.5.

The clear goal was to enable building Greeting card templates, so creators could sell something on our forthcoming marketplace.

Think about a greeting card for a minute and what that implies. It helps if you’ve used editing tools like Canva or more complex layout products, even PowerPoint.

The version of Touchgram that lingered on the store, v1.2.5, has only a very simple engine that allows you to compose Pages with either a picture or solid color background. With a range of page-change effects, you can achieve a surprising amount of…