Prior to February 2019, I published all my retrospectives on Indie Hackers:

• Zestful Month 5: Launched, but Still No Customers

In this post, I demonstrate how to retrofit automated tests onto an untested legacy library.

This is part two of a three-part series about how I resurrected ingredient-phrase-tagger, a library that uses machine learning to parse cooking ingredients (e.g., “2 cups milk”) into structured data. Read part one for the full context, but the short version is that I discovered an abandoned library and brought it back to life so that it could power my SaaS business:

Given how much urban design affects our lives, it’s surprising how little we think about and participate in it. This book was eye-opening in terms of the way I look at cities and how its inhabitants interact with them.

I took for granted the idea that cities should be friendly to car-travel, but the book highlights many ways in which a focus on car-friendliness makes cities worse overall. It was interesting to see examples of how cities can flourish when they prioritize the needs of pedestrians, bicyclists, and public transit.

When I arrived on the scene, it wasn’t a pretty sight.

I saw formerly active, cheerful Python classes in a sorry state of atrophy, having gone years without exercise. Functions at all levels of abstraction were crammed together inhumanely under the label utils. I tried to read the UI code but found something obstructing it. After a closer look, I was overcome with nausea. The obstructions in the view layer were, in fact, gory chunks of business logic.

Prior to February 2019, I published all my retrospectives on Indie Hackers:

• Zestful Month 4: Shipping Too Late