Last Post Recap

In last week's post we wrapped up setting as the main goals for the coming week to finilise bank data integration and refine UI. And that sumarisses pretty much everything we accomplished this week except a minor hicup.

Integration Finalization

While finalizing the GoCardless integration, we encountered an unexpected error code that occasionally appeared when making requests. The error message said that the bank account was "processing" and therefore inaccessible for data retrieval. However, the account's status showed "READY."

After a quick message to the support team, we discovered that our code sometimes sent two requests in rapid succession for the same account. When GoCardless receives simultaneous requests for the same account, it blocks both, returning an "account processing" error.

To solve this, we implemented a queue mechanism in our code. Now, when a request is sent but hasn't received a response, any subsequent calls wait for the initial request to complete. This way, relevant data is fetched once, with follow-up requests only taking place after the first is complete or reusing the previous response whenever its possible.

UI and Mascot Updates

The landing page now features our mascot, Rebot. It still needs some tweaks — I’d like to add background elements to the images to better match the context of each section. Although I love the "KO" pose of Rebot, it may not be ideal as one of the first images visitors see at the top of the page. We'll likely adjust the layout over the coming weeks. But this is not our priority right now.

Next Steps and Goals

Our immediate goal for next week is to onboard our first user who will provide access to their data. This will allow us to build our first automation using real data, which we aim to have completed and tested by the end of the month. In december we will add a couple simple but usefull features around the automation like sending automatic reports to landlords and reminders to tenants. In january, we want the product to be very simple but good enough that it will actually be useful to property managers.