Changelog

On this day, 2 years ago, the first Visualizer commit was made. Last year I wrote all about how and why and the rapid changes of those first months, so do read the 1st Visualizer Anniversary post if you haven’t yet. And recapping the story of Visualizer on a job interview¹ yesterday, I realized that this past year has been just as insane, if not more so.

In January, I introduced a massive change: switching to a freemium SaaS model. At that time there were 1,200 users and just over 200,000 upload shots. Today there are 2,822 with over 700,000 shots, and this past Sunday we just broke a record of most uploaded shots per day: 2,180. I’m quite happy with how Premium subscription got received, and I hope it’ll keep growing. I’m very grateful for everyone who signed up. You make this service possible! I do my best to keep improving the service for everyone, not just Premium users. They did just get a couple of really nifty new features, though. 🥰

There were many other new features added in the past year:

• New search fields and improved comparisons
• Added conductance and resistance lines
• Improved searching of your own shots
• Added OAuth 2.0 support²
• Added Weight annotations at stage transitions
• Added EY calculator
• Added “system” theme and ability to display in Fahrenheit
• Completely rewritten Decent People page
• Added RSS feeds and private notes
• Made a massive overhaul in how shot data is stored

And many more tiny ones improving the functionality, performance, or just fixing bugs. Such is the life of a modern app. Just since the last post, there were many such changes. The biggest one of them being a completely new Premium page with all the questions, that I commonly get, answered.

You might notice one drastic change: there’s no more Pro/Café plan. That’s because in the entire year I only got 1 person emailing me about it. And even they didn’t reply when I asked for a feature set they’d like. 🙈 Apparently, Decents aren’t really used in such environments. And for everyone else there is Flow and Cropster Cafe. I’m happy I offered the option, though, because now I know that any time spent on café focused features would have been time lost. So we all benefit. 😅

Thanks for reading, but mostly thank you for being a loyal user. 🙏

Following up the last post, I have more time now and here are 2 new features that I’ve wanted for a while.

First one will show you all the coffee/grinder/profile combos, and the last grinder setting you used with each of them. This is super useful when you’re going from one coffee to another, or when you have a special coffee that you don’t use that often. In my case, that’s a bag of decaf that I drink one or two per week and always forget what the grind setting was. This solves that problem, and now I can always just open Visualizer and immediately see what the grind setting was for any coffee I brewed recently.

The second one is a more visual one and something I always wanted to see on a plot. It’s a plot of all the enjoyment scores in the past 6 months.

Both features are available on separate tabs on the main Your Shots page. But I’ll remember the tab you chose, so whenever you come to Visualizer, the one that you had last open, will open again. Both features are exclusive to Premium users. Mainly because I don’t consider them a must-have, but also because I’d like to boost my income a bit, now that I’m jobless. 😅

Hope you’ll love these, as much as I do, or sign up for Premium if you haven’t already.

There were also a couple of minor improvements since the last post. My favorite one is detecting change in dark/light OS theme and reflecting it on the page immediately. 🤩

Thank you for reading this post and using Visualizer! 🥰

This week, I did one of the biggest things I wanted to do for a long time: extracting all the JSON data out of the main shots table. With the popularity of Visualizer, the table grew a lot, and it keeps growing faster and faster every day. The simple database design I started with didn’t cut it anymore. The Your Shots page got slower, search got slower, people listings got slower, all because that table grew over 7 GB in size.

I knew I needed to do something about it, but I also knew I can’t screw this up. It had to go super smooth without downtime, without data inconsistencies, and at every step giving me a way to revert in case something doesn’t go quite right. Migrations like this demand time and focus.

I recently became unemployed when the company I worked for has shut down. While that was really unfortunate, it also gave me the time necessary to finally tackle this thing. And, I’m happy to report, it all went super smoothly, with no hiccups, and most of the pages are now way more responsive.

There were quite a lot of other changes since the last update:

• you can now quickly navigate to a previous/next couple of shots on every shot page
• you can hide/show annotations on a chart
• the enjoyment placement got improved for better information fidelity, especially on mobile
• you can now edit the barista information
• I’ve made it clearer that, if you’re private, only you can see yourself on the search page
• many small bug fixes

I also recently switched from PointDNS to Cloudflare, since some users were experiencing issues that could only be explained by DNS. They seem to have resolved for those users for now, so maybe it actually is always DNS.

Thanks for reading, and enjoy your weekend! ☕