This one wasn’t about unveiling a shiny new homepage or a massive design overhaul. It was about something a bit less glamorous, but absolutely necessary: finally tackling the backlog.
If you work in tech, you’ll know the list I mean. The “I’ll get to that later” jobs. The half-fixed bugs you keep meaning to revisit. The tiny frustrations you’ve trained yourself to ignore because there’s always something bigger on fire. We carved out time to go after them properly - and it turned into more of an adventure than I expected.
Of course, I couldn’t just stick to fixes. Somewhere in the middle of this bug hunt, we decided it was the perfect time to add a whole new system: match scoring. CreateScene’s always been about connections, but until now it was up to you to figure out who might actually click with you. Now, match scoring does some of the heavy lifting - using shared Scenes to help surface people you’re more likely to get along with. It’s a big step towards making “meaningful” matches more than just a nice tagline.
Then there were the usercards. They’d been quietly grumbling in the background for months - cramped, awkward, and not really showing you off. We gave them a full rebuild: expandable matched Scenes, more space for info, a personal intro, and a self-card you can whip out in person with a QR code. Desktop, mobile, app - they all got the upgrade.
Some of the fixes were satisfying quick wins. Others… not so much. The autofill logout bug on the app, for example, looked like it’d be a half-hour job. Cue an afternoon of spelunking through code that hadn’t seen daylight since we first shipped it. By the end, not only was the bug squashed, but a few other lurking oddities went with it.
We also cleaned up the little things that chip away at the experience - pinned images behaving oddly, mentions that finally show profile pictures, privacy settings that make sense at a glance. None of these will make headlines, but together they make CreateScene feel sharper, faster, and just a bit more thoughtful.
Clearing the backlog might not be glamorous, but it’s the kind of work that sets the stage for the next big thing. And now that this one’s behind us, we’ve got a few ideas brewing for what that might be.
Frazer
CTO @ CreateScene