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Old vs new: how Otto stopped over-reading its database.
One person running a product review in Otto blew through my Supabase egress. My first guess was traffic. It wasn't. It was reads far wider than the question being asked:
→ the live review log re-read and rewrote its whole row every 3 seconds
→ every screenshot loaded every review the workspace had ever run, just to find one
→ access tokens were re-checked against the database on every request
The fix removed nothing. Every screen answers exactly what it did before; it just asks Postgres a narrower question. One row per log line, the one review by id, a 30-second token memo. Estimated from the code: ~100 MB saved per 40-minute review. Measuring it properly is next.
PM lesson: cost bugs hide inside "it works". Reading your own data paths is product work, not just engineering work.
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A client came to me with a problem every exhibition team knows.
They collected visitor business cards all day…
then someone had to type up the details and email each lead to the right company.
Slow. Easy to mess up. And leads went cold while they waited.
So I automated it. Here's how it works now 👇
📸 Staff take a photo of the visitor's business card and fill a short form
🏷️ They pick the visitor type (the company this lead belongs to)
💾 They click Save
That's it. In the background, the system:
✅ Creates a clean PDF with all the visitor details
✅ Emails it to the right company automatically
✅ Sends a confirmation to the staff member who added it
🔁 If an email fails, it retries 2 more times on its own
And if an email still fails?
I added a new screen to their admin panel:
→ See every email: Sent ✅ or Failed ❌
→ Resend one with a single click
→ Or resend all failed emails at once
No chasing. No lost leads. No manual follow-ups.
The client loved it, and honestly, that's my favourite part of the job.
The lesson: good automation isn't flashy. It quietly removes boring work so your team can focus on people, not paperwork.
If you run events, exhibitions, or any business where leads get lost between "collected" and "followed up", let's talk. My DMs are open 👋
In many lab environments, resubmission work can become fragmented across spreadsheets, emails, shared folders, comments, and individual reviewers.
That creates problems like unclear ownership, missed deadlines, lost revision history, repeated mistakes, and poor visibility into bottlenecks.
Sample Plus brings that entire process into one traceable workflow.
Just started work on this product wish me luck 🍀
moving lab resubmissions out of spreadsheets and emails is the real win here. ownership finally has a home
A support fix can pass its test while the case still needs monitoring.
In the Support Ticket Escalation Kit's fictional example, Rowan verifies a synthetic monthly export at 14:00 UTC. Casey updates the customer at 14:15. The case remains Monitoring because the next scheduled run still needs checking.
That final stretch deserves its own record:
• Verification: what succeeded, when, and where the evidence lives
• Customer update: who sent it, with a timestamp and thread reference
• Follow-through: who checks the next run and the next customer reply
• Reopen condition: the observable failure that sends the case back to investigation
Here, a failed monthly export under the verified configuration, or a new customer report of the same symptom, reopens the case. A successful test does not erase the remaining checkpoint.
Shown: the actual resolution-and-closure page from Command Current's completed fictional example. The people, ticket and outcome are invented teaching examples.
The digital kit includes a six-page editable Word packet, matching print PDF, Excel workbook with 40 blank ticket rows, six-page worked example and two-page Quick Start. Designed for desktop Microsoft Word and Excel; PDFs are static copies.
Use it alongside your approved support system. People verify the evidence and send updates; the templates do not connect to a help desk.
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