Things have finally settled down at work from the Christmas season. One of the reasons I was eager to take the job at Tabblo was to work on a consumer-facing product for a change. As I put it in a (perhaps ill-considered) comment during my interview process:

I know all the ways enterprise software sucks — I want to learn how consumer software sucks

What I meant was,

I’m familiar with all of the challenges involved in building successful enterprise software, and I’m kind of tired of them. I’d like a chance to learn about the challenges unique to consumer software.

Yes, I really said the first one, and yes, the second one would have been much wiser. But I got the job anyway, and for the past year I have been learning about consumer software. One of the things I’ve learned is: Christmas is busy.

Not only is Tabblo consumer-facing, but we sell real products, and ones that make good gifts, so we had a huge increase in orders in December, as anyone who’s traveled down this path could have told you. Add to that that we had only just recently launched our book products, and you have a very hectic holiday season indeed.

But we shipped a lot of books, and all helped out in the factory, and shipped stuff, and got to play with the barcode guns, and so on. I especially enjoyed the book manufacturing process, both the software creation to produce printer-ready files, and the actual manufacturing. There’s something very satisfying about working with paper, and holding a finished product in your hands.

Things are now beginning to get back to normal, where my job is mostly about planning features, writing software, triaging bugs, and so on.