Hogwash

I haven't written in a while, but it's been a productive stretch behind the scenes, the old house and the app both. Then Mrs. Grumpty (unprompted, mind) mentioned Grumpty on a popular short-form video platform, and a flurry of signups followed. Unexpected. Not unwelcome. Good timing, as it happens: the past couple of weeks had gone on security and stability work, the locks and the load-bearing bits, and a crowd coming through the door is one way to find out if it holds. A few small features and updates went out besides.

I've been using the app myself, day to day, the way you would. When a job needs a tradesperson, you can jot down a few of them and what they'd charge, then book one when you're ready. That part had got a bit fiddly so I simplified it. I'm a simple pig. The app should be simple too.

Then I tidied the corners I'd left bare. The screen while a page loads, the one you get when your wifi drops, the one when something's broken, all used to be blank nothing. Now they carry a little whimsy. I took a scythe to the grumblets that were running too long and getting cut off, so they made about as much sense as one of Thatch's blueprints. The hidden game got a lick of paint too.

And finally, Grumpty.com has been approved on SaaSHub and I have a Product Hunt draft ahead of a proper v1 launch later in the Summer.

Right. The trough won't fill itself.

Two useful things first. Browsing Suggestions got less of a trudge: there's a bar across the top now, so you can jump straight to the heap you're after instead of scrolling past every job in the place. And you can deal with a job from the grumble, the daily email I send, without opening the app at all. Mark it done or kick the can down the road, right there in your inbox, for the mornings you're halfway out the door and can't be doing with another login.

Then a bug turned up, and it didn't come quietly. There's an old line about never wrestling a pig: you both end up filthy, and the pig enjoys it. Today an iPhone learned that lesson the hard way. A fault in Suggestions that only ever showed its face on a phone, never once at the desk, and every time I grabbed for it the thing slipped off into the muck. So I went in after it. I got filthy. I enjoyed it. The bug, eventually, did not.

The rest of the week went on the dull business of making sure folk can find the place at all. A sty nobody's heard of is just a pig talking to himself. Some of it feels a touch greasy, all that shouting for attention, but the word has to get out somehow.

Anyway. Enough mud for one day. Your filters won't change themselves.

A big job means ringing round for prices, then losing the lot on the back of an envelope. So the trades and their prices now sit in one spot on the job, under "Who's doing it?". Line up a Hired Hand, someone who isn't on your list, or just yourself, with a price or without. They stack cheapest first, so you can see who's having you on. Settled on one? Hit Pick and Grumpty lines that trade up and books it then and there, the one move. It's the prices you're weighing, mind. I'm not turning into your accountant.

A few of you mentioned wanting to track more than the list knew about, so the pile grew. Two new heaps, Cleaning and Yardwork: the kettle furring up, the oven you ignore until it smokes, the mower that won't start in spring because nobody serviced it last year, the hoses that split the first hard freeze. The dull periodic stuff that creeps up, not the daily wipe-round. It waits in Browse suggestions, so your list only grows when you say so.

The rest was more dull behind-the-scenes plumbing to make sure the search engines know Grumpty exists.

If you take a wrong turn on the site and land somewhere there's nothing but muck, have a poke about down there. Who knows what you'll find.

Anyway. Your gutters won't clear themselves. Go away.

Most of what shipped today you can't actually see. What you can: fresh grumblets at the top of your Slop Trough, fresh and dry every reload.

Look out for rare chrome brushed grumblets about the lore behind Thatch, Twig, and old Wolfy.

The rest of the day you can't see at all, and that's rather the point. It went on locks, doors, and tests. Dull as a wet Tuesday, but honest work that'll prevent things blowing up in our faces down the line.

Most of today went on the grumbling itself: when to stop, when to keep at it, and when exactly to turn up.

When to stop. You can tell me a job's booked now, with a date if you've got one, and I'll leave it alone until the day. The morning before, a quiet heads-up so you can clear a path. Booked but no date gets a softer nudge, because "booked, no date" is how a thing quietly never happens. Mark it done and it clears. Less of me, on purpose.

When to keep at it. A big job you book weeks out used to get one email when its window opened, then nothing until it was already late, and two months of silence is plenty of time to forget. So the long ones get a second poke halfway through and a last word the week they're due, each one worded differently so it isn't the same grumble on a loop. Quick jobs still get the one. No need to make a fuss over a filter.

When exactly. Yesterday I made sure the morning email turns up at all; today I made sure it turns up on time. It used to lean on a timer that drops whole hours when it's busy, so an eight o'clock grumble might wander in at twenty to ten. I swapped it for a clock that keeps proper time and checks every ten minutes. Set your hour, get your grumble within ten of it.

Two more came from you lot: the green "done today" tick now stays put until midnight instead of vanishing the second the next job's scheduled, and the Slop Trough stopped sliding off the side of small phones. Both came from people actually using the app. Keep doing that.

Right. It's Saturday, I've been staring at a screen since morning like a mug, and there's a perfectly good wallow going to waste. Off to lie in the mud. Don't email.

First external user request: let a monthly job land on the same weekday each time. This guy, we'll call him Captain Helmet, 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, Captain Helmet.

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 app. 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.