Grow Together (2023)

14 March 2024

Grow Together (2023)

Once again, I give you the Coupling yearly round-up. This time… 2023!

2023 was another year of merely organic usage - I have done zero promotion, other than the normal blogging I do… which isn’t really promotional in nature.

I did spend some time doing some more R&D on the app though, and we’ll see how/if it comes through.

Numbers

The work I did to make the calculations easier is really paying off! I basically haven’t done much at all to collect the data. Which is nice.

We’ve got 389 spins for the year, across all teams. There were 15 teams were actively using the app, and about 157 players, meaning the typical team has about ten people. Coupling is useful for bigger teams that pair! Which makes sense - they’ve got a bigger problem to solve.

Pins were more popular this year than last year - up to 41 pins applied. Only two teams were actively using them though, so it seems likely that feature discoverability is a root cause here. Though I wouldn’t assume everyone needs that feature anyway. There were two teams using pins, and both were on a weekly re-pairing schedule. In fact, weekly repairing is very popular - 6 teams averaged to that cadence.

In addition to those teams that did weekly re-pairing, a fistful of teams did daily re-pairs, and few did every 2 days.

The team that had the most consecutive use were on that two-day cadence - coming out to an estimated 250 days of use. That’s a huge chunk of the year! Other teams that consistently used coupling ran for between 130 and 160 days.

So them’s the numbers - it looks like teams that previously used Coupling, generally continued to use Coupling. That’s reassuring to see. :) But at the same time, we’re not seeing all that many new-adopting teams. Considering I’ve never had any real understanding of how previous growth happened, I don’t have much insight to add here either. All I can say is that if you find it useful, spread the love! If you don’t, tell me about what’s working for you that you like more! I’d love to hear from you.

Features

Oof. I know I did some stuff this year. Probably. Let’s look…

As always, Coupling runs on the latest versions of Kotlin, React, etc. Maintenance is basically cheap and mostly automatic. It’s not exciting, but it is uncommon in this industry still sadly.

Coupling now has a new feature, that is entirely unadvertised and I haven’t decided what to do with. It can now accept “contribution” data, and the Coupling CLI (also new) can be used to automatically parse contributions from a git repository and upload them to the Coupling service. There’s even a github action for uploading contribution data automatically!

Coupling contributions can include information such as:

At this time, this is pure data collection and consolidation. It is purely voluntary, and I’ve done my best to make it minimally unobjectionable: the Coupling service never sees your source code, or even your git repository. The data format for contributions is simple, and I wrote an additional open-source tool for generating it from existing git repositories, though its a fairly trivial format.

In the future though, I imagine being able to see relationships between how your contributions roll in and how your pairing is established over time. I imagine this might be interesting for team leads and coaches!

So that’s one idea. What else was there…

I added another kind of graph to the statistics page. Nothing too exciting, but I wanted to try out another graphing library in anticipation of having more interesting data to work with.

I haven’t used it yet, but I set up Coupling so that, if I wanted to take payments for something, I could do it in an extremely easy Stripe-managed payment page. I still don’t have any clarity on what Coupling-for-pay could become yet, but its always in the back of my mind. Richer social data for team leads seems like a fruitful and relatively unexplored avenue.

Oh! And probably the biggest feature that came online in 2023…

Discord and Slack integration!!!!!

These are pretty great. Now you can configure a Coupling party to automatically send pairing assignments to Slack or Discord. It’ll even update as you make changes or delete assignments! This has been a pretty nice quality of life improvement for remote teams, and my team has been taking advantage of it frequently. One of the friends-of-the-team has even taken to looking at the pairing assignments, pulling out the call-signs (for example, “Rubber Iceman”), and generating an AI image of the team working together.

These images are always very, very silly. And that sparks joy.

That’s all for now! Thanks for reading, I appreciate you all so, so much.

Image generated by ChatGPT.