Hi friends,
September brought two new team members, Unas actually going live, and me building a teddy bear with a QR code on it. Let me explain all three.
Two new beavers
I have a long-running cooperation with some schools in Sweden where I take on students to teach, mostly because I think it’s fun. This month William Laitila and Saimonas Klietkus joined as interns to help with ArbTask development.
After a few days getting the codebase running locally, William went through Rocci’s running list of UX issues and friction points and picked off a couple of bugs himself, PRs and all, by the end of the month. Good first taste of how we like to work here: one branch, one PR, per fix (a lesson that took one round-trip to land).
Unas is live
Quick reminder on the OAuth2 side note from before: Aukro itself is moving to OAuth2 and retiring the old password-based auth. Since Unas was a brand new integration, we just built it OAuth2-native from day one instead of building on the old flow and migrating later.
Best month yet for Unas. We got our first real merchant connected on the 18th, fixed a language bug in category names, added bulk loading for products instead of one at a time, and chased down a duplicate-offers bug. The static IP problem that’s been quietly dragging on since August is also finally sorted.
And the big one: Unas integration actually launched, and we got our first Aukro order through it.
Shoptet catches up on OAuth2
Shoptet is the older of the two Aukro integrations, so unlike Unas it still had the old password-based auth to deal with. That work landed this month: new Shoptet users get OAuth2 automatically now, and existing users have the option to switch over.
Small bonus: Shoptet shipped a redesign of their own merchant dashboard this month. It was straightforward to include in our app. Looks genuinely slick. You can’t really tell that it is a completely separate iframe that runs inside the Shoptet admin.
Luckan gets SumUp
Added SumUp as a new supported payment method on Luckan, the restaurant management software we built for Johan and Friends. Compared to the Stripe terminal setup already in place, SumUp comes with noticeably lower physical card fees for the merchant, good news for a restaurant running tight margins on card payments.
Bear Trail
Finally built the silly side project I’d been wanting to for a while: trail.beaver.codes. My son’s homework book had this idea where you send a real teddy bear on an adventure, and whoever finds it takes it along and writes about where it went. I remixed it: ordered a real teddy bear with a QR code on it, scan it and you land on a page where you can leave a note and a photo of wherever the bear ended up.
My son’s birthday is tomorrow, so he gets to be the one to send the bear off first. Can’t wait to see where and how he does it.
Personal
Treework ate another big chunk of the month, some weeks it was every single day. At least I was able to capture some of it on my phone so Rocci can feed it into our Instagram🙂
Also did two trips to Stockholm this month to meet up with fellow entrepreneurs. So cool to have people to talk to about how life is going, work and not work wise. Thanks Yuri Gusev , Daniel Ferin, Dennis Hettema and Markus Rundgren for all the good times!
— Pavel