When the Update Is Still a Work in Progress

“What have I been up to lately?”

It sounds like a simple question until you try to answer it. There has been work, writing, learning, fixing things, and discovering that the thing you just fixed has another thing behind it that needs attention.

Quite a lot has been happening over here. Getting it into a tidy update is another matter.

A fair amount of my attention lately has gone into County Clean, an app I’ve been developing around the practical realities of cleaning work.

One recent problem was almost embarrassingly simple. I signed in, but the login screen stayed in front of everything. Naturally, I thought I hadn’t signed in.

The software had accepted me. It just hadn’t bothered to make that clear.

That is a small example of something I keep coming back to: how much unnecessary effort do we ask people to spend figuring out the system before they can get on with the job?

When you’re working nights, carrying supplies, moving between rooms and trying to remember what needs doing next, that effort matters.

County Clean has grown out of those ordinary problems. Planning the shift. Recording how long tasks actually take. Accounting for the walk between them. Recognizing that receiving supplies or having a conversation with a supervisor also takes time, even when neither appears on the cleaning checklist.

My aim is to help the person doing the work become more capable, more informed, and better supported. I want the app to learn from the work as it actually happens, and give something useful back to the employee.

That means asking some fairly unglamorous questions. Can you read the screen easily? Do the numbers make sense? Is the next step obvious? Have I created another administrative chore for someone who already has enough to do?

I have been particularly stubborn about photographs. If proving that you cleaned something starts taking more attention than cleaning it, we ought to question what we have built.

The development itself has involved backups, updates, commands that worked, commands that didn’t, and a flashing cursor that offered absolutely no explanation for what it was thinking.

There is considerable room for humility in software development.

Meanwhile, The Last Archive continues to grow.

My Star Trek fiction has become a place to explore questions about memory, belonging, responsibility, and what it means to recognize another being as a person. Zora and the others give me room to approach those questions through relationships and consequences.

They also give me plenty of opportunities to get carried away.

Recently, I looked at some of the developing story and realized we were getting so technical that the people were becoming difficult to see. There was an awful lot of explanation, and I was starting to lose track of what the story was actually about.

So that needed attention too. The reader should be able to stay with the people in the story without needing a briefing every few pages.

Apparently, whether I am working on a cleaning app or a starship, I keep finding myself asking a similar question: can someone actually follow this?

There is a connection here to what I write about on Standing on the Ledge. So much of daily life depends on the conditions around us: how clearly something is explained, whether expectations are reasonable, whether our effort is visible, and whether we have enough room to learn.

Working on these projects makes me examine those questions in practical terms. It is easy enough to say that a system should support people. Then you have to decide what happens when someone presses a button, makes a mistake, needs more time, or doesn’t understand the instruction.

That is where the idea gets tested.

And all of this is happening alongside the ordinary business of working nights and fitting the rest of life around them. There hasn’t been a convenient pause in the schedule while I figure everything out.

I suspect some of you know that part. You can spend a week doing things that need doing and still struggle to produce one neat sentence about what you accomplished. Especially when most of it remains unfinished.

So this is my update from the middle of it.

I’ve been working, writing, building County Clean, untangling fictional lives, and correcting things that seemed perfectly sensible until I tried to use them.

There is more to do. For now, I can at least say the login screen was supposed to disappear.

Sometimes that is the part you get sorted out today.