What One Person Shipped This Year

Vera is built by one person in Melbourne, mostly at night. People are usually surprised by that, and then usually ask how it is possible, so here is the honest version including the parts that are not flattering.

What being alone buys you

A decision takes as long as it takes to make it. There is no planning cycle, no alignment meeting and nobody to convince. Something that irritates me on a Tuesday is often fixed by Wednesday, which is a genuine advantage and the main one.

What it costs

Everything is sequential. While the memory system is being rebuilt, nothing else moves. There is no second opinion on a bad idea, so bad ideas run further than they should before somebody using the app points them out. And support, marketing, design, accounting and actually writing the code are all the same person's evening.

What actually got done

Dark mode across the app. A rebuilt cast. Shared Spaces. Voice that sounds like a person rather than a station announcement. A website that no longer claims things the app cannot do, which took considerably longer than it should have because there was a lot of it.

What did not

Android. Streaming replies, which is the single biggest thing standing between how the app feels and how it should feel. Deleting your account from inside the app rather than by email. All three are on the roadmap and none of them have a date, because a date I miss is worse than no date.

Would I recommend it

For a product that needs one clear opinion held consistently, yes. For anything that needs to be in three places at once, no. Vera is the first kind.