Olga Drew the Cat
For most of its life this app wore icons that I made. You could tell.
I have been writing software since 1998 and I can build a lot of things, but what comes out when I open a drawing tool is best described as evidence that a developer passed through. It functions. Nobody looks at it twice, including me.
Then Olga opened a pull request.
PR #85. New icons, drawn from scratch, in vector, in every size a browser tab, an iPhone, and an Android launcher could ask for. It is the first pull request in this project’s history from someone who is not me.
Who Olga Is
Olga is the co-founder of Catarchy. She built the cat cafe in Nha Trang with me, baked several thousand shawarmas in a kitchen that is far too hot, kept the pride fed through the years when almost nothing else was going right, and drew cats the entire time.
She has been drawing cats for our patrons for years. Somebody joins on the Croissant tier and eventually a hand-drawn portrait of their own cat arrives. Sometimes it takes a while. We never forget our debts, we just take our time.
So the drawing was never the surprising part. The surprising part was the pull request.
I have been alone in this repository since it was a spreadsheet for nine cats. Every line, every bad decision, every 2 AM fix, mine. Opening a notification for a change I did not write, did not ask for, and did not have to argue about was a genuinely strange feeling. Good strange. I sat looking at it for a while before I merged it.
The Cat
Here she is.
A black cat under a nón lá.
That hat is the most ordinary object in this country. It is on the woman selling bánh mì at the corner, on the farmer in the rice field outside town, on half the people at the fish market before sunrise. Putting it on a street cat says the whole thing without a word of copy: this project came from here, from this coast, from the cats who actually live on these streets and the people who feed them anyway.
The eyes are the part I keep coming back to. Anyone who has walked home late in Nha Trang knows those two yellow circles, floating at ankle height under a parked motorbike, deciding whether you are a threat or a possible source of food.
Where You Can See Her
She is on the app. She is on your home screen if Meo Mai Moi is installed. And as of today she is in the tab of this site too, which had been running on my old placeholder for months.
There is a small confession attached to that. An icon nobody sees is not really an icon, and for a couple of weeks installed apps were stubbornly holding on to my old artwork, along with an update screen that would not let anyone through to the new build. That is fixed now. If the app is on your phone, Olga’s cat should be looking at you from the home screen.
Not Alone
A solo project has a specific way of dying. The one person holding it becomes the only one who knows how any of it fits together, and every improvement has to squeeze through their available evenings. I have been aware of that shape for a while and mostly tried not to think about it.
One pull request does not fix it. But something did shift, and it is not only about workload.
For four years Olga has been doing the part of this project that has nothing to do with code. Feeding, fostering, drawing, holding the whole thing together while I disappeared into a terminal. None of that ever appeared in a commit log, because commit logs are a narrow and slightly stupid way to measure who built something.
Now it appears in the commit log.
Thanks, Olga. First through the door.