Grow Together (2024)
02 March 2025
Coupling yearly round-up 2024! Doing it again!
This year I didnāt add a ton to the app, though there were more behind-the-scenes updates. The contribution system seems to be working!ā¦ but I still havenāt really promoted it or moved it to a space where most people could use it.
I really should move some of that out to be more available - most of the work Iāve put into the app recently has been on the contribution visualization side. All that said, its a bigger hurdle to configureā¦ but it can show some insights into the relationship between contributions, contributors, and time.
If that sounds interesting to you, reach out and Iāll quick make it more available.
Anyway hereās Wonderwall (the stats for the year).
Numbers
There were 8 active parties (and it looks like one experiment). They had 271 spins for the year among em, and 62 active players in all. Thatās about 2/3 the traffic of last year, so a few teams dropped off clearly. Sāall good - I hope the teams are still ok!.. lots of change has been happening in the industry lately, people moving all around.
Most of the teams had between 6 and 9 players, which makes sense to me - I imagine Coupling is most useful for coordinating larger teams. Pretty sure I say that every year! š
Nobody used pins at all in 2024. Thatās an astonishing drop-offā¦ I double-checked to make sure nothing was broken, and its not, but what actually happened was all the 2023 pin traffic was from two teamsā¦ that no longer use the app.
My takeaway isā¦ the current user base probably doesnāt even realize the pin feature exists! If they were experimenting with it and not liking it, Iād have expected to see something at least. So Iāll try to do a pass on some kind of nudge or reminder system about features that people might be interested in.
Frequency information! Most of the teams are on a weekly rotation - once a week. Two teams were on a bi-weekly. As far as I can tell, no teams were on a daily rotation in 2024.
Last year the bulk of the spins were from twice-a-week teams, but this year the weekly teams beat them about 60/40ā¦ which takes some doing, because their numbers go up twice as slow! Interesting.
I donāt have a lot else to add here, other than thanks to everyone who uses the app, I hope it makes your lives better.
Features
I already mentioned it, but most of the big changes done in 2024 were to the Contribution system. So Iāll quick recap what it is, and does.
Couplingās contribution system allows you to:
- Record discrete ācontributionsā for any given project, including a number of stats. Principally who did it and how long it took to do, along with many other kinds of metadata.
- Track the rate of contribution over time, and how it relates to specific team members, pairs, or even mobs.
The goal is to create a fuller picture of how your team is performing, and provide visibility on things happening with the team space that might not be obvious. Iāve added a bunch of convenience features, such as adding new players from their contributions (in case you have a contributor that you havenāt registered officially).
The best way to set this up on a project is to automatically create contributions when things get merged to your source of truthā¦ which can be done most easily using the ādiggerā tool I developed, available on NPM and Gradle. Uploading the contributions can be done using the Coupling CLI, after creating a secret for your team. Thereās even a Github Action to make uploading your contributions easierā¦ and I use it to track Couplingās development! Mmmm, dogfood.
As you can see, there were a lot of components to make this feature work! But I imagine for some longer running teams it could be really potent.
If you want to try it, again, please reach out! I need as much feedback as possible.
Best wishes! Thanks for reading!
Image generated by ChatGPT.