The Bulletproof Goth

Ramblings

Field notes, work logs, and things worth keeping.

The Waiting Room

Three Products, One Milestone

There's a particular kind of quiet that happens when you stop building and start testing. The frantic energy of construction gives way to something more patient — watching, checking, waiting to see if the thing you made actually holds up when someone else touches it.

This month, three of them hit that point at once.

Career Pivot — the person-to-career matching platform under Fuller — has moved into User Acceptance Testing. *Clarity for where you are. Insight for where you can go. Direction for what's next.* That's the promise, and now it's the part where the promise gets checked against reality: real interviews, real data, real people trying to find direction and seeing whether the tool actually gives it to them.

Jobs Accumulator is right there alongside it. *Collect. Collate. Deliver.* Built as Career Pivot's natural companion — gathering job ads from multiple sources, deduplicating them, formatting them, and getting them in front of the people who need them without the noise. It's a newer project than the other two, which makes watching it reach UAT at the same time feel less like coincidence and more like the pipeline finally clicking into rhythm.

Refrain, the collaborative online music platform for musicians worldwide, rounds out the trio. This one sits under Reverberation — TBG's saying movement — which feels right. A platform for musicians to find each other and make something together is, in its own way, a piece of infrastructure for connection, the same instinct that runs through everything else here.

Three products, three different corners of the work, all arriving at the same threshold in the same window. UAT is unglamorous by design — it's not the part anyone posts victory laps about. But it's the part that decides whether everything before it actually worked.

Sparkles Still Wants You

Meanwhile, Sparkles — the ADHD productivity app — is still short on testers for its Play Store closed testing track. If you've got an Android device and five minutes to spare being one of the people who helps catch what needs catching before this thing goes wide, that's still an open door.

And Elsewhere, Slower Work

Not everything here moves at UAT speed. *An Odd Romance* — the literary novel that's been building quietly in the background — just crossed 23,000 words. It's slow, patient work: a few hundred words at a time, a retrospective narrator telling her own story in her own time, trying to get the telling of it right rather than just the getting-it-down. No testing phase for a novel. Just the next scene, and the one after that.

This Last Week

This Last Week

This last week has been a helluva year, don't you think? Or is that just me?

Just me? Oh, ok.

Outside of beyond-the-norm work dramas, I've been getting a lot of background work done, including:

  • Organisational structure is ready to go to the solicitor & accountant (including the rules of governance and so on) for fine-tuning before tBPG becomes more than words on a page (on a thousand pages)
  • Same for The Greatest Band That Never Was including a virtual creative space for the project, legalities and so on
  • Website updates (most of which are not front-end or are private pages)
  • A lot of writing - from An Odd Romance to lyrics and poems to Devil in the Church and even a little on I Can't Cook Part II
  • The Philosophy, Principals and Method

Yeah, I'm feeling a little worn down but oh so satisfied.

I even made it out into the yard today, and managed some drawing. The image here isn't that drawing though. It's an older sketch of Winona. I haven't finished my current drawings, nor scanned them, and I rather like this effort. What do you think of it? How's your week been?