1 step backwards, 2 steps forward.The perfect summary of my previous 2 weeks.

As you may have noticed (or most likely not), I didn’t had the chance to get a video or a post ready for my 8th week, and I have a perfectly good reason for it. 2 weeks ago I started working on some improvements for Sentrya. - Updated the UI and UX - Improve the processing speed - Added the option to delete your account - Allow users to update their whitelist filters Until Wednesday, everything was going according to plan. That’s when I thought it would be a good idea to free up some space on my laptop. I started deleting some old videos, folders with stuff I didn’t need, cleared my bin to make sure everything is clean, and got back to work. Opened up my code editor, and… Nothing there. Just a blank file. I went on full panic mode. Started looking for the folder. Maybe I moved it. Maybe I can still save it from the empty bin. I almost started crying. All my work was gone. I f*ed up really bad this time. I went for a walk for 30min to calm down, and try to figure out what I can do to salvage Sentrya. Luckily, I remembered that I still had my old code on github, and I still had the front end code on another platform. It’s not great, but it’s better than nothing. So I went back to work. I had a lot of updates to add, so it took me until Monday to get everything back up to speed. And last week, I managed to: 1. Improve the processing speed after registration by a lot - by 95% to be more precise. The old process took about 30 minutes to get through a user’s email headers and extract the necessary info. Now, it takes only a minute and some change. 2. Another thing that kept bugging me was the inability to update the filters after they were created. That lead to some headaches where you could miss an important email if the sender wasn’t on your whitelist. Not anymore! Now you can add or remove senders from the whitelist as you wish, and filters will always remain up to date with your changes. 3. As a last thing, I’m getting closer to removing the biggest barrier of entry to Sentrya. Sentrya was still in testing mode, which meant that it wasn’t verified by Google, which used to put people off. I get it though. I wouldn’t trust a new company that hasn’t been verified, either. But that’s all about to change. I got Sentrya ready to be sent to Google for a closer inspection, and I can’t wait to get their verified badge. This should definitely increase user trust (fingers crossed 🤞) Hopefully I can get everything sorted in time for a Christmas special 😉 See you next week.