One step back to take to two steps forward.

Progress on the styling possibilities of Mapsemble. Enable audio to know more.

Should I Have Killed My Darling?

After my first blog post, I realized that some key features of my app were buggy and needed serious refactoring. One of the main culprits was the functionality for permanently saving and discarding changes, while the app saves all progress to temporary storage in the meantime.

SaaS gurus would consider this a 'nice-to-have' and not in the spirit of a lean startup (building the bare minimum and ship it). But I got carried away, build it quickly (and a bit buggy) and convinced myself it was an essential part of the app. It turned out it was more work than I thought and on top of that it wasn't even working properly. I had the option to either fix it or get rid of it, I decided that I couldn't kill my darling, so I took my time to fix it (hopefully).

Lessons Learned

So there you go, I spend the bigger part of the week refactoring things I possibly shouldn't have built in the first place. But I think it's still a pretty cool feature to have. Plus, by the end of the week I was able to implement some of the features I had been meaning to build—features that had been mentioned by a potential client.

New and Improved Features

This week also saw the introduction of several key improvements:

• Better Default Styling: The previous black markers (visible after importing) didn’t make a great first impression. I’ve now updated the default styling for a more polished look, although there’s still room for improvement.
• Custom Icon Uploads: You can now upload SVG files as custom markers for your maps.
• Clustering: I’ve added the option to enable and style feature clustering for each layer, making large datasets much easier to navigate.
• Additional Fixes and Tweaks: Numerous smaller updates and bug fixes to improve the overall experience.

For a full demonstration of how the new styling and clustering work, check out the video above!

What’s Next?

I’ll continue listening to feedback and rolling out improvements. More updates next week. Thanks for reading!