Yesterday I submitted my first pull request to @VitrinaRandomBot. That's it, I'm a developer now)

I'll try to tell you more, because there's a whole story with feelings here...
The task sounds trivial: increase the number of rarities and update the icons. But when I got inside, it turned out that this pulls along both the backend (logic for issuing rarities, probabilities, balancing) and the frontend (display, animations, compatibility with old items so nothing breaks for users).
I had to run the logic through all the places where rarities are mentioned in the code. And there were more of them than I expected...
Now my teammates are reviewing my code. I'm waiting for the verdict like a student waiting for their diploma grade - I probably messed up somewhere, but we'll see) If the review passes, the feature will officially go to production, and I'll proudly point my finger: this is mine!.

The irony of the moment is that I've already launched a solo product - SmartDay, remember? There I did everything myself, from backend to design, without a reviewer. And here, after so much time in business, I only got to my first PR in my own product 😅 Such is the entrepreneur's path - one moment you're a founder, the next a junior, then a reaper, then a player on the pipe)

If you don't remember, a month ago I launched a pet project: a tool that looks at my old contact database every day and tells me who to congratulate on their birthday today. Here's what happened over time, broken down by numbers and feelings:
🔵On average, I congratulated 7-8 people per day
🔵Out of those 10-15 who had birthdays in the database, I deliberately skipped some - couldn't find their Telegram by phone number, or they looked weird
🔵There was never a negative scenario - no one told me off or blocked me
🔵About 20% replied "thank you", some quite warmly)
🔵3-4 people directly asked: "who are you anyway?" - and each time I honestly admitted that we didn't really know each other, just that their birth date had once ended up in my old CRM
🔵The remaining 80% - silence.

I didn't turn anyone into clients - and honestly, I didn't even try. I didn't bombard them with ads or links to Vitrina, not once.

About discipline and feelings - this was the hardest part.
This turned out to be the most difficult point of the entire experiment. The first few days were really uncomfortable - as if you're getting under someone's skin without permission. You write to a barely known person "happy bday!" and inside you feel a bit anxious: what if they don't understand who I am, and it looks strange or even creepy.
And when they started asking "who are you" - a completely different feeling kicked in, very similar to cold sales. The same chill in the chest before sending a message to a stranger, the same momentary pause before hitting "send". And this despite the fact that there was no intention to sell - the mechanics of recognition work the same way, whether you're selling something or just want to congratulate.
Subscribers to the channel didn't increase during this time. Zero, not a single person. So if anyone thought this was a clever way to grow an audience - no, it didn't work, and that's also an honest conclusion)

What I understood and where I'm heading next
1️⃣You should congratulate, but definitely not everyone the same way. I blasted everyone indiscriminately - and that was a mistake. Segmentation is needed from the start

2️⃣Divide the database into "A" (definitely congratulate), "B" (would be nice but not critical), and "C" (don't touch at all). For "A" people, you can even send a Telegram gift - it's a cheap way to stay in someone's profile for a long time and stand out positively from a text "happy bday"

3️⃣Need a reminder algorithm: after the first contact, the service should suggest "the acquaintance has already happened, it's time to either sell or just maintain the contact" - and here it's important to think about frequency so as not to turn into a spam bot that gets blacklisted after six months

5️⃣I dream of making a parser for chats I'm in - to find people with birthdays there and understand if my target audience is there, with whom it's worth getting to know better. That's the next level, but the idea won't let go)


In short, the experiment is alive, but I think I'll stop until improvements.