DEV Blog 43 - Project Updates

A comprehensive overview of my Advanced Gospel Initiatives

I am plowing through many pre-production steps. I’ve identified 15 discrete steps some of which are quite complex. My goal to go live (God willing, God tarrying) will be Tuesday September 1, 2026. You might be wondering WHY I included the year, LOL. There is a common joke in the software development group that you can’t trust a specific date like Sept 1 without knowing the year. Software is complex and it’s traditional to ensure that people know that you’re talking about less than 30 days from now … and not a year and 30 days from now. Geek humor. Now you know.

This is not like other DEV BLOG updates. For the first time, I am going to define ground-floor volunteer opportunities. These are not technical opportunities as much as community based ones. If you have already onboarded, you know that I’m speaking about the fact that I want PRMNews to be “…a community driven application.” I mean it.

On one of the most critical paths that I have right now, is keyword management. The keywords are the words and phrases that are sent to the news sources for fetching articles. There are roughly 140 of these so far and many are not tuned. How do I know this? Because I’m the guy that is the human-gate in the QA Center before you as a user can see articles in production. I’ve been owning this for the past 4 weeks and there is a lot of room for refinement. Please see below for a better description of what is required.

I can tentatively confirm that production deployment and the 1.0.0 version will be Tuesday, September 1, 2026. The marketing site will be up and running by that time and you can read about the application solution and what it offers the Watchman Community and why. I’m gaining demo-practice during the 45-minute onboarding live on Zoom (sign up using button below: Reserve a Spot). From there I’ll write a script (so I don’t wander) and shoot the walk-through video that will let you see the website and feature sets before you subscribe.

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General sentiment: I need the community’s help!

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PRMNews App

The following are immediate volunteer roles that I need help with. From my point-of-view, it feels highly missional. You would be serving in your capacity as a senior Watchman or Watchwoman so that the entire ecosystem is enriched. The following roles are what I need help with:

Keyword Analyst

One of the most critical things we have to tune is the definition of keywords. It’s not as simple as fetching all the articles where “Elon Musk” is in the article title. There is a surprising number of other attribute requirements involved that are quite important. For example, the confirm and deny words that validate the keyword intent is actually in the article body. Fortunately, I’ve applied my 2.5 years of working with keywords and formulated a brand new wizard which does most of the tedious work for us. I am hugely relieved with the potential for this, but it’s early days.

I just defined a new keyword for “Christian Persecution” after realizing that I wasn’t quite querying the news sources correctly. Once the first big pass of tuning occurs—which has to happen before Sept 1, the ongoing role will include evaluation of Sandbox queries from users that have been nominated for inclusion to the global feed. I’m looking for 1-2 more people for keywords. We are going to do one category at a time until the results begin to show improved alignment.

QA Center Supervisor

As you may recall, there is a human in the loop before articles are promoted into production. Much of what has happened by the time articles land in staging and become enriched in the evaluate stage is to automate the pass/fail of articles before they go into the QA stage. I have worked extremely hard to make the article by article review and grading cycle as fast as possible. The supervisor role is coordinating the moderator team and is the float resource that makes sure that we get articles published Monday through Saturday. We do not work on Sunday! I need one of these volunteers.

QA Center Moderator

This role is probably one of the most heavy that we need, because it needs regular participation to work. The articles are go/no-go and stop the entire pipeline unless all article level (accept/reject) decisions are made. After the QA Center review has completed, it is a keypress to continue the pipeline. Those steps are all automated and do not need to be supervised. We aim to complete the process as early in the morning as feasible. Currently, the automated schedule kicks off at 4AM Pacific.

Fair warning, this team will notice unwanted or misaligned articles. For example, a cryptocurrency keyword including the term: Bitcoin has the unfortunate habit of pulling articles about the price and volatility of Bitcoin, which is not aligned or relevant for what the Watchman Community is interested in. Bitcoin is important, sure, but we want articles dealing with how Bitcoin interferes with the One World digital currency in Rev 13. My point here is that when you deal with 102k news sources in 200 countries, there can be a lot of similar articles that demand an accept or reject action. Especially because the worldwide news flow is fascinating to watch and multiple news agencies publish slightly altered articles that essentially cover the same news event. It can be a grind to work through those. But moderators will work and report these types of observations to the supervisor who will work with the technical team, led my me at the current time.

Please also know that the QA Center is multi-user and parallel. In other words, 2 or 3 people can work the queue at the same time! When you look at the next article that comes into your view, you may notice that others working the article flow may have claimed the more recent ones and are not done scoring them. You get the next one that has not been claimed yet. This is a highly performant process. Each article gets claimed and shown to you in about one second. After scanning the title and a bit of the description, you’ll be able to judge the outcome. There is a 1-keypress mnemonic D=duplicate, R=not relevant, Q=quality, S=safety problem, M=misaligned, etc. My sustained rate is about 5 seconds per article. With a small concurrent team, we can divvy up articles and get through them in less than 30-minutes.

I will be training the moderator team personally.

Documentation Specialist

There is a massive difference between technical and user documentation. People that write user documentation are very talented people. That’s because they are the ones that pay the price to reduce and simplify what people understand about screens. They are the folks that help screens make sense—hence, they are heroes of the software development lifecycle (SDLC).

Here’s my concern, PRMNews has a lot of screens and some of them are dashboards with Key Performance Indicators, trending indicators, and charts with x-axis and y-axis plot lines. The documentation specialist thinks like a user—this is key, but they have the experience and ability to understand the the app’s business logic, including the ability to talk to the technical team if any questions about functionality arise. The user documentation is typically a one-time effort. I’m considering putting the documentation inside of the PRMNews application. I think from a total commitment point of view, it’ll take an hour or so to do each screen. Once the full suite of screens is documented, then this role will diminish because the docs don’t change much after that.

Business Analyst

And the last role that I’d like to talk about is that of the business analyst. This is the person that has a mixture of business skills, technology skills, and some algorithmic or mathematical skills. It’s a very important role because a Business Analyst can actually validate and substantiate that a calculation showing up on a key performance indicator is correct. Now, we are working on automated self-audit passes, which make this easier. But we’re not done yet, and we have a lot of data that continues to need review. The analyst is somebody that has one hand on a calculator and the other hand looking at the screen, and they’re thinking critically about the data, making sure that it is correct. It would be great if we can get one to two people to volunteer some time. Again, this is going to be biased very heavily towards the initial month or two that the app is released on September 1. After that, the ongoing demand for analysis should settle down.

It is important to know that I’ve been working on what I call a transparency center of excellence. I’m partially implemented with coverage of the Birth Pang Analysis Dashboards. I wrote a completely different application in Python to verify that the calculations are correct. Every morning, at the end of the ETL cycle, the balancing routine executes we it scores each of the Birth Pangs. Additionally, if there is a mismatch somewhere, it automatically spawns a support ticket with the details so it can be further investigated. I will continue working on the audit and transparency system over the next few months.

Time Commitment

For the next few weeks up to a couple of months, most of these roles are quite flexible. There are short meetings that will occur from time to time, but mostly you can interact with your teammates and peers through the Team Chat cohort.

I think it’s important that you know that we’re asking our community to help support this amazing effort. And I’m pretty committed to this because I’ve spent two and a half years now working on the engineering side and ideating over a fantastic user experience. I believe this is the first app of its kind and easily the most sophisticated and easy to use. In fact, this has been confirmed during my onboarding sessions where I hear comments appreciating the thoughtfulness of my approach and how I’m trying to intelligently support the needs of the Watchman Community.

We are at this amazing point in time in which there is a foundational ground floor opportunity for others to get involved. We can absolutely see the app grow in influence as we see more people waking up and wanting more answers. Personally, one of my dreams is to get Pastors involved, too.

And we can also help other users at large as we apply our skills, abilities, and resources to make this app a better place. If it was actually just me working on the app, then it’s not going to reach its full potential. So what I’d like to say is that any time that our team can give some of their time and expertise towards these types of app features it would be greatly appreciated. And of course it would not just benefit all of us, it will let me rest a bit. I’ve been working hard to bring this to our community and can’t wait for your first impressions.

If any of this makes sense and you have the time and ability to assist in this great effort, then please message me using the button below. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.

My prayer requests:

1. Please continue to pray for this intense period of getting PRMNews off the ground. I am making incredible process and believe I’m ahead of schedule. But for those that know software, there is a lot of things that can come at you from various directions and complicate the process. So far so good. Thank you all for praying…it shows!

2. Last week, I also asked for prayer for the missionary couple in Japan that are having some complications with their unborn twins. Obviously this is a delicate situation. The mom has been in the hospital on mandatory rest for about 6-7 weeks now. I personally can’t even imagine how hard that is. They have a 2-year old that is likely experiencing displacement as this medical problem is pulling mom away from home. Please continue praying over the situation. Thank you!

3. Finally, I’d like to share that Gary and I are sinking our teeth into the plot line. We are meeting again tomorrow morning to discuss plot and character level trajectory. Right now it’s wide open! That is a blessing, but I think we’re going to try to project the storyline more concretely so that our writing is tighter. Pray for protection. It’s possible that we’re already seeing the glimpse of spiritual warfare.

Thank you all from the bottom of my heart!

#Maranatha

YBIC,
Scott

Long Term Roadmap

Rapture Kit 3.1 [IN PRODUCTION]

RKPi5 (Raspberry Pi Project) [IN PRODUCTION]

Keychain Rapture Kit [IN PRODUCTION]

Go to Keychain Rapture Kit (here)
Go to Facebook (here)

Book 6 - The Dax Hunter Files - A Creed of Saints [IN PRODUCTION]

Gary’s personal website (here)
Go to Barnes and Nobles (here)
Go to Amazon (here)

Platform Diversification [IN PRODUCTION]

[ON HOLD] Bible Bench

[ON HOLD] Bible on Blockchain

[WAITING BOARD OF DIRECTOR APPROVAL] Web 3.0 Projects