During my internship at 6Wunderkinder ,I was part of a team with three engineers, where we worked for a whole day on just uploading localized screenshots and metadata to iTunes Connect. Our goal was to release an update to our users, but we were blocked by this tedious and long process.. This marked the first time I experience the pain of the release process for mobile apps and started dreaming of a better solution. As I worked for future companies and experienced the same pain over and over again, I decided it was time to build a tool that automated the tedious tasks I found myself constantly repeating. When I saw how much more efficient and faster this made me and my team, I knew I needed to share this tool with the community.

I’m super proud to announce, that within the last 8 months,fastlanehas saved developers around the world over 1,000,000 developer hours. This equals:

  • 41,000 days
  • 1,300 months
  • 114 years

Putting that into perspective,every minute that passes,fastlanecurrently runs for12 hours, which is more than a full work day.

Think about all the things you could do with the extra time:

  • Watch 660,000 soccer games
  • Get 38 different bachelor degrees
  • Circle the globe 15,000 times in an airplane
  • Watch all Star Wars movies 75,000 times
  • Build 10 Berlin Brandenburg airports

As developers, we know it’s incredibly motivating to see how users are using what you create at an exact moment at this exact moment. That’s why we built fasttrack, a simple web-app that visualises fastlane launches in real-time. Every time someone launchesfastlane, a rocket is being launched in the color of the corresponding tool. This is super motivating for me and the Fabric team to continue to deliver value to our users:

Every time I catch myself doing something that doesn’t add any direct value to users, I look at the rockets and regain my focus.

Once fastlane is set up you can do something else while your computer works on the tedious tasks for you. This is huge: You can work on your app, or you can play Super Smash Brothers with some friends (which is what I usually do).

I want to thank all fastlane users and contributors for making fastlane such a proud community success. I’m looking forward to the next 1,000,000 hours and can’t wait for what’s next!