Last Week

Last week was the first real door-to-door marketing run for Shokken.

I visited six restaurants around Las Vegas and learned quickly that a busy restaurant with wait complaints is not automatically a good early customer. Some restaurants already have established waitlist systems. Others have seasonal demand, hard-to-reach managers, or guest-facing language needs that Shokken does not yet handle well enough.

The most useful outcome was a clearer target: restaurants with real waitlist pain, lightweight or manual tooling, and an owner or manager who is open to trying something new. I planned to add language support, find another group of prospects, and get back out for another round of visits.

Then COVID put the week on hold.

An Unplanned Pause

This is going to be a short update because almost nothing happened.

I caught COVID and ran a high fever, with the highest reading at home reaching 102.7°F. On the third day of the fever, I went to the doctor and was prescribed an antiviral. The fever disappeared within a day of starting it, but feeling better has been a much slower process. I still feel terrible and have had no motivation or energy to work.

The only meaningful progress was a small set of updates to Shokken’s public-facing sites:

  • the product site
  • the guest status site, where guests join a waitlist and review menus

Those changes reached the integration environment, but I have not promoted them to production. They still need more testing, and this was not the week to pretend otherwise.

What does it mean in English?

There is no major product milestone this week.

I got sick, most of the planned work stopped, and the little work I did complete is still in the non-production integration environment. The live sites have not changed because I have not verified the updates well enough to put them in front of restaurants and their guests.

That is the entire status: two site updates are waiting for testing, outreach is paused, and recovery comes first.

Nerdy Details

Integration is not production

The important technical distinction this week is between finishing a change and safely releasing it.

Shokken has separate deployment environments. The integration environment is where related changes can run together before they affect the public product. Production is the version real operators and guests rely on.

The product-site and guest-status-site changes are running in integration, so they are far enough along to deploy and inspect. That does not mean they are ready for production. I have not tested them thoroughly enough, and promoting them while sick would create risk without providing any meaningful benefit.

That restraint matters most on the guest status site. It is not just a marketing page. Guests use it to join a restaurant’s waitlist and review menus. A bad production release there could interrupt a real guest flow, so “deployed somewhere” cannot be treated as “done.”

The honest weekly record is a small one

A weekly development log should not manufacture progress when there was none.

The accurate record for Week 81 is simple: COVID wiped out most of the week, two public-facing site updates made it to integration, and neither has been promoted to production. The restaurant outreach and follow-up product work from last week will have to wait until I have recovered.

Next Week

Next week depends on how quickly I recover.

Once I am feeling well enough to work normally, I need to test the product-site and guest-status-site updates and promote them only if they are ready. After that, I can return to the multilingual guest experience and the next round of restaurant outreach.

For now, the plan is to recover and get back to what I was doing.