I expected this week to move Outpost further forward. Instead, it became a reminder that for small independent businesses, staying on track does not always look like doing the thing you planned. Sometimes current customers and existing products are more important than work on future products.
As an indie, you're often faced with two kinds of interruptions. There are those where you lose momentum for the wrong reasons. Then there are those that protect the foundation of your business. Sometimes the hardest thing to do is figure out what kind of interruption you're actually dealing with.
What looked like a simple addition, a dialog to manage presets, turned into something far more involved. That is just how software often goes. New features have a way of expanding the moment you get into the real work.
Along the way, I was deep into a bug in one of Sherpa's new tables. The issue was due to the order of two lines of code that just needed to be swapped. Upon further inspection, this fix could be applied elsewhere in Sherpa. This also solved a long term issue I've been trying to track down for quite some time. What started as a frustrating detour ended up making Sherpa substantially better.
It was also a week of other important diversions, including one I’m sure many of you know all too well, tax day. April 15th was especially consuming because it was effectively double tax day, the last day to close out 2025 taxes and the due date for Q1 2026 quarterly tax payments. None of this is glamorous, but it is part of running a real business. It is not off track. It is the track.
There are also times when life outside of work has to come first. This was one of those times when someone close to me needed my time and guidance. As an independent builder, life doesn't always pause while the roadmap is playing out.
Outpost still matters and the overall mission hasn't changed, just the timeline. As I promised, building in the open means not just sharing the wins, but the losses too. Although Outpost itself did not move forward this week, the business underneath it got stronger, which in my book is still a win.
Have you had a week where the roadmap did not move, but the business still got stronger?
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