When last I left this project, I had picked up some hella cheap Velcro from Make and Mend (craft supplies thrift shop! So great!) and attached it to the straps to hold the bag onto the handlebars while I fastened the actual buckles. This is a HUGE improvement in the user experience and worth keeping, although I needed to overlap the edges by more so that the grippy side of the hook and loop tape didn’t grip the strap itself, causing fraying, fuzz, and eventually decay.

However, the bag closure was not great. The flap wasn’t really secure, the buckles over it were awkward. Just didn’t feel good.

Soooo today I dug out an old zipper that had previously been sewn into a (failed) pattern trial, ripped it free of the zipper flap, made a new zipper flap, and sewed it into the opening. Also adjusted the Velcro overlap and positioning on the straps, and removed the buckles closing the main compartment.

MAYBE THIS IS BETTER.

#BodgedBikeBag #iterativedevelopment #sewing

Ok, initial feedback:
- yeah these need a zipper closure and a lot more structure/stiffening than most of my bags have.
- my civvie ship has a much much shorter fork than the choppers I’ve been riding. This is probably why most handlebar bags are like 8” deep not 12”. Good to know. (It still fits but not by much.)
- Velcro helps a ton in getting it on and off easily, yes to this.

#sewing #bike #iterativedevelopment

Post-revision photos. The bag body has a print of rainbow watercolor dinosaurs on black canvas, the straps are rainbow webbing, and the hardware is black plastic.

Photo1: a hand showing the side-release buckle and tri-bar stretching across the top of the tote bag body. There’s a flap of black canvas under it that can fold over the bag contents to keep them stowed (which would be unnecessary if the bag had a zip closure).
Photo2: the back of the bag showing the two handlebar straps at the top and a centered loop of webbing with tri-bar at the base of the bag to go around the post of the fork.
Photo3: a closer view of the handlebar straps showing the loop of Velcro. This isn’t intended to be extremely weight-bearing, just to hold things in place so you can have both hands free to lock the straps in place
Photo4: the original tote bag straps that go over your shoulder are still in place. You can absolutely take this off your bike, run errands, and then rig it back up for the ride home.

#sewing #handmade #process #iterativedevelopment

Only combine efforts when working together makes things much more valuable. Otherwise, keep projects separate and fund them as individual, promising investments. Oversee all your different experiments.
#MarketFit #SustainableGrowth #ProblemSolver #IterativeDevelopment

Build the smallest useful part of your product or service in a way that can be easily repeated. Get rid of all delays and transfers between different stages. (32/35)

@sarahjeong.bsky.social

Yeeaaa... it's a different approach.

(Don't read this as a defence of Musk, he's a turd, but SpaceX has competent technical people below their chimpanzee-on-a-string PR person)

NASA's traditional approach was to basically achieve perfection of design and manufacturing before trying to launch anything. Look at every possible failure mode of every component, down to the tiniest screw or wire or bit of plastic. Keep redesigning parts until you eliminate all failure modes that you don't have triply-redundant backups for. Test the living snot out of everything on the ground, in the lab. Have massive technical and safety reviews to ensure nothing was missed, anywhere.

It worked about as well as anything could, but it was extremely slow, bureaucratic, and above all incredibly expensive. Tons of rework when issues were found meant having to go back 3 steps to change something, and then redo the massive amount of work that had been done since then to make sure no new failure modes were possible, etc.

SpaceX is doing things differently - #iterative design. You design, build, #integrate, and #test-to-failure as often as possible to learn where the weak spots are -- you then rapidly iterate when you find the problems. "Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly" is an expected part of the process - it's how you learn the limits of what you've built, where the problems are.

Neither one is "the right way". They both work.

#IterativeDevelopment