A Bug's Life: Plumbers, Electricians & an Invisibility Cloak Harry Potter Would Be Proud Of
You slump down into the front seat of your car. A flapping exhale. Scans came back with nothing on them and you’ve just been told by the top dog that, in his eyes, “there’s nothing wrong with you that he can see & you might just have to live with this pain - or try to find a good physio…”
You think to yourself - “but I’ve tried every bloody physio for 50 miles and none of them have helped me much”.
Deep down you know something isn’t right. And you simply can’t get past the almost crushing level of apathy. Everyone you see tells you you look fine, that you’re healthy and inside all you are getting from them is rejection after rejection - dressed up in kind words and those looks that smirk “this might be psychological, you know”.
It's unfair. Brutally unfair. Chronic pain is more invisible than Harry Potter when he has his cloak on, and more life-affecting than poor Harry finding out - “yer a wizard Harry”....
This is a whole system thing too.
It’s not just in your health care professionals treatment room. It's everywhere. Not being believed. Not being listened to. And by not getting those things, your literal experience of your own fricking life is denied by others. Every scan, blood test and professional seeing “no visible problem” as “no problem at all”.
Which in this opinionated Sports Rehabilitator's view - is the fuel for my fire - and I could rant about this for days.
But let’s not do that, let's tell you about how I found THE EXACT SAME THING in the place I least expected - inside my app 🙈
Let’s make like Marty McFly and head back in time for a moment…
Let's wind the clock back to my early days after qualifying from University. I was taking courses in all sorts of therapy techniques. Every course got me excited that I could help more people but over time I began to feel that something wasn’t fully right.
Every course focused on a specific muscles role or movement pattern but what I was hearing in my clinics wasn’t this - it was pure unadulterated suffering.
People's fears, worries and misconceptions came rolling out of their mouths from the moment they sat down at appointment 1. Those weren't muscles I could rub or joints I could move...
This was the invisible making itself visible, the rest of the iceberg underneath the surface.
The whole human experience relates to pain and this means you help the person not just at the surface, you have to go deeper and make the invisible, visible.
It turns out - this is exactly how you have to build and fix software too.
In building this app, I’ve learned some hard lessons.
I’ve played every character in A Bug's Life multiple times by now but I’ve realised that some bugs live underground and actually if you look hard enough - you find they even hide there too.
It's not enough that my apps' frontend buttons and navigation worked. I had to verify that the thing underneath actually does what I want it to. The thing that I saved for later - did it save to the database.
The function to process that information from your Move plan - does it write to the correct place and does that place get read by the correct piece of code at the right time.
Turned out we had a small termite factory's worth of the same type of bugs across a few parts of the app. And as any founder reading this will know - it's one thing to find this before users are using the app, its another to find it when your paying users are using it.
Of course, I wished I had Harry's invisibility cloak to cover me up when those emails from paying users landed in my inbox describing the issues they had experienced.
Digging into it what I found was this:
The plumbers had piped half of some jobs and the electricians mostly hadn’t wired their half up. Some functions wrote to tables that never got read. Some readers were staring at blank pages because of simple errors in naming where they should look.
With earnest I plumbed in what needed plumbed and wired up what was missing.
No more Biggie having a brain freeze and asking about something that was a few weeks in the past. He actually had the accurate up to date information but he was reading from the wrong places sometimes.
The bit that kept me up at night was that these termites were quietly spreading a little further every time the app was used because they were silent. Nothing could tell me about them in the logs and it took my amazing early stage users (hat tip to you guys!!) to explain what they were experiencing for me to find them.
That’s kinda like what happens in the clinic.
The information is all in the room.
But I don’t know what I don’t know about the person, and they don’t know what they don’t know about pain and what influences it.
A good investigation session can seemingly sort both of those things out - whether you’re looking at a human body or at some software.
And then your app is actually doing what it says on the tin. BOOM.
I’m off now to my properly plumbed and wired in shower to wash those termites out of my hair….