/shuffle
I'm here to tell you about a hidden feature of sorts that I built for Buttondown. Go to buttondown.com/shuffle and you will be served a completely random archived email, pulled from the population of all newsletters who expose their archives and consent to being indexed by search engine brokers.
This tool began as a bit of a joke internally. The phrase "StumbleUpon for newsletters" was at one point deployed. It has since become a bit of a tether for me, a splash of water that reminds me of what actual users are up to -- and, just as importantly, reminds me that all the test data and sniffing around for edge cases is nothing compared to the sheer breadth of the UGC firehose. (Is that two water metaphors in a single paragraph? Whatever.)
Much hay has been made of the ability of LLMs to sniff out latent bugs lurking within your codebase. But even judging solely on wall clock time, Fable and Astra have absolutely nothing on the efficiency and signal-to-noise ratio of me spamming refresh on /shuffle, scrolling through the page, and jotting down whatever feels odd, broken, or — crucially — just sort of wonky.
Vicki Boykis writes about walking around your app:
More importantly: if you are building an app, you need to also constantly be testing and touching different parts of it to see if the app flow makes sense. Look at the UI dropdowns, try the search bar. Toggle the toggles. How long does it take to load a result? What do the results look like? What colors are the buttons? How do they work on different devices? At different internet speeds? What about your payment gateway? How does onboarding look for a brand new user in North America? In New Zealand? Could you onboard from a fresh device in under three minutes? Do images load from your CDN?
UGC makes this practice both more difficult and more important in that your app is actually two things: the lovingly and painstakingly manicured constructions of the author-facing app, and then the unstructured dreamspace that your users build with whatever tools you're brave enough to give them.