🤔 Ever added a feature without thinking it through? 🙋♂️
I did, and it nearly cost me my sanity 😵
A cautionary tale for all solo makers out there 👨💻
It all started with a seemingly innocent request 🙏
To allow clients to identify anonymous devices 📱
By setting a custom ID in our SDK 🛠️
Sounds simple enough, right? 🤔
But then another client wanted to set it from the frontend 💻
This is where things got messy 🙈
You see, the device was our sole source of trust 🔐
Any push would overwrite all the data 📝
But now we had two conflicting data sources 😵
When moving to a high-throughput DB 🗄️
A fundamental change is required:
Don't update, duplicate and filter by ID instead 🆔
But with multiple data sources, this became impossible 🚫
The trust model was broken, and I was in the fire 🔥
Trying to keep our analytics afloat 📈
In the chaos, I never audited the feature's usage 🕵️♂️
Turns out, only 1 out of 120 clients used it 10 times last month 😲
Talk about a low-impact, high-cost feature! 💸
So, I made the tough call and killed it today 💀
A hard-learned lesson in prioritizing and thinking ahead 🤔
#buildinpublic #techdebt #sdkdevelopment #productmanagement