The Happening Blog
Dev notes, product thinking, and honest writing from the team behind Happening.
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What we learned shipping Happening v1
Happening v1 shipped last month. This post is the retrospective I wish more product teams would publish: the bits that worked, the bits that didn't, and the things I'd do differently if I were starting again tomorrow.
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Privacy by design: how Happening handles your event data
The fastest way to lose someone's trust is to be vague about their data. So this post is the opposite of vague: it is a complete walkthrough of what Happening stores, where it lives, who can see it, and the things we deliberately chose not to do.
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The math behind finding a date everyone can make
On the surface, Happening looks simple. Friends tap the dates they can make, the app surfaces the best date, the host picks. But the moment you start writing the algorithm down, you realise it isn't simple at all.
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Group dinners shouldn't take 50 messages
I went back through my messages last week and counted. Organising one Saturday dinner with six friends had taken 73 messages over four days. Nothing was booked at the end of it.
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Why we built Happening
A few years ago I sat in a group chat with my oldest friends, all of us doctors, trying to pick a date for a party. After 45 minutes of back and forth we gave up. Not one date worked for everyone in the next four months. That was the evening I started thinking about Happening.