The Most Important Problem for Flow Shell: Billing

Billing is currently our biggest challenge in Flow Shell. Solving it will require some tricky engineering – especially if we want to make it easy for Paul and others to install. Still, that's far better than drowning in endless ESG paperwork!

The good news: all of this engineering work doubles as progress toward our replacement for Iguana.

We're eager to take your money soon, but the current billing process is bogged down by tedious forms. That’s why I’m holding off until my flowlua tool is production-ready—so we can automate everything and skip the paperwork.

Paul is already keeping a list of people to bill once the new system is live and automated.

After I finish re-implementing the music:play feature, my next priority should be porting over the invoice generation tool I prototyped earlier. That would be well worth it, since our future billing system will use flowlua as its backbone, enabling users like you to self-serve—without ever needing to talk to a human.

So generating invoices for Paul is next on my list, apparently the most important engineering problem for the business (after playing music).

There will be some headaches, though—managing dependencies like getting LaTeX running on Windows is never fun. Still, that's a small price to pay if it means never filling out another set of forms.