Build Log - April/May

The new version of 10FastFingers went live in April, and while the launch was technically smooth, the user reception was rough. People hate change, and the sudden design overhaul triggered a massive wave of complaints on the feedback forum.

But it wasn’t just resistance to change, much of the criticism was spot on. The old v2 calculation system was limited but reliable for most languages. The new system, however, caused immediate issues, especially for Vietnamese users. (The old system struggled with Asian languages like Chinese, where a dictionary would need 2,000 characters with keystroke calculations for each). We also ran into performance issues with the typing box. React handles highly dynamic areas poorly, and the multiple updates per second caused heavy lag for users on older devices, particularly in schools.

At the same time, I was dealing with severe burnout. Feeling so overwhelmed made it exhausting to process the criticism, let alone fix the issues. April and May were completely unproductive. I did what I could to put out immediate fires, but because the new code was entirely outsourced, I didn’t touch it. I lacked the confidence to deploy even small features out of fear that the whole thing would break.

You would think that finally launching after all this time would get things moving again, but the opposite happened… more on that in the next post.