March 30, 2022
August 19, 2021

One Year of NativShark 🥳ー Summer Update, August 2021

Hey everyone! Caleb here again 👋

It's been a hot minute since I last wrote one of these! Quite literally. This summer has been insanely hot 😅

I hope you've all been doing well this summer. Staying safe, staying healthy, getting your studies in!

Anyway, wanted to pop in and say "hey"~ We're all still alive and working away daily, making solid progress.

The content team is really starting to pop off lately, up to 4 units published a week. Getting close to the goal of 7 per week, a new unit for every day. Once we get there, most students will have zero chance of ever catching up to content production ✨

I asked Jacob (our hero solo dev at the moment 👀) what has been happening in development of the platform the past months and he said he's:

- Planning on how to modularize the progression system to make future additions and changes easier
- Figured out ways to normalize the data that is stored to make it easier to reference, search through, and evolve as necessary
- Prepared the system so that it can support multiple paths
- Established new standards in the codebase, a new architectural approach, new hosting, new framework (NestJS), new language (TypeScript), etc. Complete overhaul of the engineering side of things to make things better. A lot of background work that will pay off in the future.
- Started moving data piece by piece to the new system (currently happening in the background and running alongside the public facing production site)
- This includes basic account information, billing information, and all information required for units
- Started work on a new data format for flashcards, as well as a new storage method to allow for quicker calculations to be made (which flashcards are due on which day, for which type, in which decks, and the same data for previous days) with the ability to get that data nearly instantly

All in all, have been making a lot of progress on the re-write we mentioned earlier this year. The rest of this year there will still be a lot of background stuff happening in the codebase but entering next year, after all Jacob's hard work this year, we'll be ready to pop off and push out student facing updates significantly easier. It's important to invest in your infrastructure! Take the time and do things right. We'll also likely be looking for another full time dev next year, not sure when so more on that when the time comes.

The community has been awesome as well! Lot's of new faces this summer. And recently, with our 1 year anniversary so many people coming in with there 365 day streaks!!! Joining the "bonfire club":

Check out the #learning-progress channel in our community for tons more lovely messages from students :)

In one year we've:

- had students complete 230,077 units
- 140,723 student hours studied
- 1,202 subscriptions
- had 67 students with a continuous study streak of greater than 365 days 🎉
- gone from $0 - $20,000 MRR
- pushed 5 major platform updates
- created an entire content delivery pipeline for consistent unit creation from nothing
- raised $300,000
- so much more~

Thanks to everyone who has been a part of this journey so far. Grateful to you all! Looking forward to what we can accomplish in the next year. Much to come.

Let's get it.

~ Caleb

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