Two months, mostly after midnight

A short note on where SLED is, who's building it, and why we're up so late.

People have asked when SLED is coming. The answer is "v1, soon." I'm not putting a date on it before I'm sure. The only thing worse than waiting for an app is downloading one that wasn't ready.

So instead of a date, here's where things actually are.

Who's building this

I've been building SLED with my brother. We run a small studio together — Rocco Digital — and during the day we build software for other people. At night, we come home and build SLED. For the last couple of months that's mostly meant working until three or four in the morning. Vampire hours. A quiet house. A lot of coffee.

It's not glamorous work. Most nights are one of us hunched over a laptop saying "wait, why does this break when you tap it twice?" while the other one walks across the room to look at the screen. We don't take meetings about SLED. We just build it.

How the work has gone

In two phases.

The first stretch was exploratory — building, breaking, throwing things out, trying again. We didn't have a process; we had an itch. By the time we had something that looked like an app, we'd learned a lot.

So we slowed down. Adopted real coding practices. Arm-wrestled over features. Fought to stay true to our ideal of elegant simplicity. Not because the app is huge — it isn't, and that's by design — but because the discipline of doing it right is a small tax we pay. So your Total Gym stops being a clothesline.

What's surprised me

Three things, none of them what I expected.

How much of the work isn't the workout screen. It's the four knobs in the settings sheet. Deciding what to expose, what to default, what to leave out. The workout screen took two weeks. The settings sheet took six.

How quickly an app starts to feel real once you've used your own thing for a few weeks. I've been doing the SLED workout on my own Total Gym most days for the last month. The bugs that survive that long are the bugs worth fixing. Everything else is noise.

How small the right answer is, almost every time. Most "should we add ___?" conversations have ended in "no." Saying no is the work.

What's next

v1 is coming. It'll be in the App Store when it's ready and not before. If you're on the waitlist, thanks for waiting. I'll write one of these the day the build ships.