Two Weeks in Review
Published April 5, 2024
I mentioned that I took off last week for the kids' spring break. I did that, and with the extra time to work on LHF, I chose to code rather than post a blog entry last week. Don't worry I wasn't slacking. I was jamming on some features and didn't want to interrupt my flow with a blog post. Let's get into the work I did in lieu of a blog post.
Exercise Directory
Dogfooding my own app lets me continuously review the exercise directory. Sometimes I miss little things like secondary muscles. Also, as I learn more, I'll adjust the exercises. I made a good amount of refinements to the directory over the last two weeks.
New Exercises
Updated Exercises
- Modify primary and secondary muscles for Dip exercises.
- Add abdominal as secondary muscle for Horizontal Wood Chop - Band.
- Add hamstring to primary muscles for "Deadlift - Barbell" Deadlift - Barbell. I can't believe I missed hamstring on a deadlift but pobody's nerfect.
- Add lat as primary muscle for Medicine Ball Slam exercises.
App Development
"Weight" becomes "Resistance"
"Weight" doesn't cover all the types of resistance across all exercises. I wanted to add the Box Step-Up. This is an exercise where you increase difficult by increasing the step height. LHF couldn't track height. It only had "lbs", "kg", and "resistance number" (which I used to track exercise bands). "Resistance" allows LHF to encompass more types of load and leads to a more expansive exercise directory.
PostHog Analytics
I want to have some sense of people's use of LHF. What is the app's retention? How many daily active user's check out the exercise directory. I had no way of answering these questions.
I chose PostHog as the analytics package because it provides more than analytics. PostHog enables A/B Testing and Feature Flags in LHF. As a big fan of both of these things, I wanted to have them from the start.
Save Notifications
Imagine you finish a set, enter your reps, resistance, and RPE into LHF, click the Save button, then... Nothing. That's how LHF worked until I added these notifications:
I like them as a unobtrusive indicator that something happened. LHF displays these notifications wherever you save a form: session plan page, session detail page, exercise preferences, and user settings.
Business Development
I spoke with a friend about beta testers on LHF. She asked if I had any or if the app was still pre-beta. It's something that I think about regularly. I've made a momentary truce with the warring factions in this debate. LHF is still pre-beta. I look at the current state of the exercise directory's "design" and think that I could spend some time refining this before I promote it to the world:
I've heard advice about bringing users into a product early:
If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late.
Come on though! Look at that screenshot! It's a list of 250+ exercises. I can add some filters to that before I expect users to struggle through a wall of links. I need to balance that advice about releasing products early with releasing something valuable.
In conclusion, I'll still be embarrassed by LHF when I open it up to beta users. Hopefully I won't be ashamed though.