Why I Made an Email Address for My Cat

As an indie dev you end up wearing a lot of hats. Most of the time I’m just a coder plugging away at my apps. But sometimes I need to be QA. Or marketing. Or a small business owner figuring out tax. They all require a completely different mindset.

This post is about the QA hat. And how my cat Earl ended up with his own Gmail account because of it.

I have too many email accounts

I have my personal email, my mononz.com email, my apialerts.com email, my shadowcat.app email. They’re all signed into everything. When I get a notification, I get it on about 6 devices simultaneously.

I needed a clean account. One that isn’t attached to any of my stuff. No credit cards, no premium subscriptions, no admin access to anything. Just a pure free user.

Testing my own apps

When I sign into API Alerts with my own email, I see the admin experience. I see premium features. I see my real data. That’s not what most of my users see.

When I sign in as Earl, I’m a free user. No workspace, no paid plan, nothing. I see exactly what a new user sees when they sign up for the first time. That’s the experience I actually need to be testing.

The Samsung problem

My dad upgraded his phone and gave me the old one to wipe before it went in the bin. Classic job for the tech savvy son. It didn’t go in the bin. It joined my test device pool.

As a mobile dev I have a lot of old phones lying around. Pixels, Samsungs, even a Windows Phone 8 device that I can’t bring myself to throw away. But I’m a Pixel person. I like stock Android and I’ve never been a fan of Samsung’s UI. The thing is, a huge chunk of Android users are on Samsung devices, and my apps need to work properly on them.

I wasn’t going to sign into all my accounts on this phone. I’d just get the same notifications duplicated on yet another device. So Earl’s account went on the Samsung. Clean install, free user, Samsung UI. It’s the perfect test device because it represents what a large proportion of my actual users are experiencing.

Earl doesn’t check his email

He mostly sleeps on my keyboard and knocks things off my desk. But his email account has been genuinely useful for QA. Sometimes the dumbest sounding ideas have the most practical reasons behind them.