Grumpty's Diary

First external user request: let a monthly job land on the same weekday each time. This guy, we'll call him Dicknose, only weeds on Saturdays and a job that only knew "in a month" kept handing him some stray Wednesday they'd never act on. Fair enough. So a monthly or yearly job can hold to a weekday now, and Saturday's job stays Saturday's. Great feedback, Dicknose.

After that I worked on the email and made it more useful. It used to bark a job name and a date and leave you to it. Now it turns up prepared: why the thing's worth doing, your own notes (the filter size, the gate code), and the trade you've lined up in Hired Hands, ready to call or email straight from the message. Which might mean you open the app less often. Good. I'm here to keep your house standing, not to count how often you visit me. Sort it from your inbox and get on with your day.

I gave the settings page a tidy at the same time, and taught the reminder where you live. It used to fire at one fixed moment for the whole planet, which is a grand way to tell someone in California their gutters are overdue at midnight. Now you pick your timezone and your hour, and it lands in your morning instead.

Two more, quiet but important items. The job library went out onto the open web, a page for every chore, so a stranger searching "how often should I clean the gutters" trips over me already holding the answer. And every night the whole database gets copied somewhere safe now, on the dull off-chance it ever falls down. You'll never see that one work. That's rather the point.

Big week. Time to relax with some Pig Pals.

Started the day with my sleeves rolled up. The privacy policy promises your data goes if you ask. So I made deletion mean it. Ask to leave, and your account clears out for good. If you were the last one in the household, that goes too. No orphaned rows left mouldering in the dark. Got the front of house up too, a real homepage with the legal bits, so grumpty.com is no longer just a locked door with a pig behind it.

And then I caught sight of my own reflection, and that was the afternoon gone. Twenty of me, in costumes: king, pirate, viking, pharaoh, yeti, witch, gnome, a small brave one. The trouble with a portrait gallery is the frame. The avatars sit in a circle, and a circle has opinions about hats. Every horn, every pointed helmet, every cowboy brim got quietly guillotined at the edge. So I re-cut all twenty with a bit of breathing room round the outside, and now the hats survive the crop.

Somewhere in there I taught the test robot to stop running the full check on pushes that only touch pictures and documents. Very sensible. Then I spent the rest of the day pushing pictures. A daft amount of fuss over costumes, and I would do it again.

I have been pigfooding the application. The trough has real jobs in it: some one-off electrical work I had done, a new roof coming up, a sewer line scoped for tree roots. There's a great tree sitting right over that line, so it wants doing again in two years. Exactly the sort of job you forget until it backs up into the house. Which is the whole reason this thing exists. I told the chap with the sewer camera I was building an app to grumble at him in two years, and judging from his reaction, he will not be coming back. Into Hired Hands he goes anyway, pinned to the job, in case he's forgotten the interaction by then. The trough still wants mucking out tomorrow. It always does. I'll try and work on something actually useful.

Busy day in the sty. The Almanac turned up, a month calendar of what's due and what's done, and you can now point your real calendar at it so the upkeep sits next to the dentist. One way, read only. I'm not letting your phone scribble back into my list.

Hired Hands arrived too: somewhere to keep the trades you'd actually call back. A tap to ring, text or email them. Pin one or more to a job. Snooze and skip landed as well, so you can shove a job a day or a week down the road without lying to me that it's done.

Then the door. New folk who clicked an invite link sailed straight past the welcome and got dumped back on the login page, locked out of the house they'd just been invited into. The step that checks the invite was handing you on without your login attached, so you turned up at the front door with no key. Fixed it to carry the key along, and now an invite actually lets you in, which you'd hope was the bare minimum for the word "invite".

Bulk delete showed up too, for when the trough wants a proper muck out. Tidy day, once the door was sorted.

So it's out. A whole app for remembering the jobs you'd rather forget, sitting at grumpty.com with my face on it. The loop works the way it's meant to: tell me what your house needs and how often, I grumble when it's due, you tick it off, I line up the next one. That was the entire point, and it does the entire point.

Then the muck. Tick a job off in the evening and it landed in the Pig Pile dated tomorrow. The server keeps time in a different zone to you and didn't think to ask, so your 9pm was already its next morning. Now I go by your day, not its. A pig should not argue with you about what day it is.

The worse one was quieter. Every visit to the app opened a fresh line to the database instead of reusing one. Before long there were too many open, and the whole thing seized up. Turned out it only bothered to reuse a connection when it wasn't running for real, which is a fine plan right up until you go live. Sorted it, and the pile-up stopped.

Otherwise: the Slop Trough and the Pig Pile got their proper names, the whole place got a grubbier hand-drawn coat, households can share one list, and finished jobs go to the Pile instead of just vanishing. A decent first day. I'm not going to make a thing of it.