Since we last spoke, we have continued work on the designer portal. Last time, we finished the sign in functionality, and this time, we will go into the designer portal navigation, sign out functionality, NextJS update, and more.
The majority of the work has been in designing the navigation layout for the signed in user. These will be either designers that want to list their patterns on Fiber Club, or existing designers that wish to manage their listings. The current layout is not only easy to navigate and consistent with the mobile app, but also performant. We also added the sign out functionality which was quite quick to implement. We have future work planned on how long a user’s session can be allowed to persist, as there is a tradeoff between security and convenience.
As part of the recent work, we upgraded NextJS yet again! We are now on Next 13.6. You can read the patch notes here, but the short version is they are mostly developer experience improvements that help us deploy and build features faster. In the process of these NextJS updates, sometimes they break existing functionality. To prevent this from impacting our app, we plan to do more automated testing in the future.
As part of the layout and navigation work, we fixed a small bug where the page footer and some buttons would sometimes be obstructed when browsing with smaller phones. The new footer is slimmer and should work on all displays.
On the business side of things, we have continued to read The Lean Startup. The chapters we read recently detail the assumptions and testing process which has sparked discussions about how to hypothesize and how to test and validate those assumptions for Fiber Club.