What have you learned or achieved this month?

Hey makers,

Have you learned something in particular this month that has really impacted your work?

In my case, I had a huge eureka moment last week when I began making centralized databases for market research & user feedback. Having all the data in one place really helps figure out bigger statistical trends & break the findings down.

Share your lessons below!

Reddit is the perfect place to find your first users, collect feedback and iterate (or pivot), for a lot of product types. There's a subreddit for literally everything, and in my specific case, I searched for sub-reddits which would allow me to mention soundescape.io in a non-spammy way, by also providing value with my posts. I got around 1000 visits and 50 written feedbacks that way (which doesn't seem like a lot, but the goal at this stage was to see how the UI/UX performs). The most valuable part were the screen recordings taken by hotjar, which I used to re-design the whole application and the landing page (which will be release pretty soon).

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@lori I'm not an active redditor at all, so mostly yes, but it depends on the subreddit. Some have stricter guidelines, for example to post something on /r/Entrepeneur you need to have 20 or something comment Karme there. In my case a lot of visitors came from /r/rain, which isn't as strict

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@lori I'm totally a reddit lurker haha, but as long as you provide value that's not of importance. I've used redditsearch.io to search after my competitors domain, this way I found a lot of relevant subreddits, and got a feeling of the post format I could use. Edit: redditsearch.io seems to be down currently

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Ivan Mir

There's also F5Bot that monitors keywords in new posts and comments on Reddit and HN. You can set alerts for the names of competing products, your own project, and maybe even some relevant phrases.

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@ivmirx This is so useful. I've seen a few such services but this one is even free, thanks!

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xavier

Agree, I'm playing with Reddit for the last 3-4 months and that's an amazing community. You can use it to:

  • get traffic
  • validate your ideas
  • monitor the needs of the ecosystems
  • Get help and super insightful feedback!

Reddit is a gem!

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Olivia Chua

Reddit is an amazing platform to get initial traction and validate your product idea :)

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Sai πŸš€

Re-Learned the 100th time: Pick the tech stack which you are already aware of inorder to SHIP FASTER.

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Sergio Mattei Author

@sainathkm This is so real and important. I’m not against learning, but learning is for learning projects. Anything serious, the usual stack choice is best!

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James Chahwan

Went from a semi-learning/semi-used to the stack I use everyday, used to be stop , start , progress, stop to figure out new thing. anyways always use the stack that you can ship the fastest.

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Macario James

Yes to this! I had an earlier reply to this thread where i revealed i'm just getting back into the swing of things regarding development. The pandemic had me just coasting and not doing much. In a 6-month long slump.

Anyway, I've had to remind myself a few times over the last week when getting back into things, that i need to just use what i already know -- buckle down and stick/choose a stack -- and roll with it. Not gonna get out of the mud if i don't just push forward with the tools i already have.

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M Ishmam

Created my web app POC for my 2D/3D illustration library: https://makesumo.com

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Ashking

I never liked 2 things - Rebass and TypeScript. Either felt those were really hard or impatient to read the docs.

Made up my mind to read and try it out with an open mind and the difference is I now like both rebass and typeScript. I am also planning to move all my side-projects to TypeScript.

Always have an open mind when learning something. I know shipping is important but take a break and learn something new often. Not only helps you in learning but also makes you understand whether it will help you or not with your work.

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Sergio Mattei Author

@ashking Glad to hear you’re liking typescript. The typescript boss @joshmanders would be proud! :)

I’ve yet to truly try it…

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Josh Manders Staff

YOOOO TYPESCRIPT IS πŸ”₯πŸ”₯πŸ”₯

The key to using it is don't feel you should jump head in, start small and increment from there.

Start by renaming all your .js(x) files to .ts(x) then start introducing types where you feel it makes sense.

Most importantly, ignore the thotleaders and use any whenever you want.

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@joshmanders We all use any in real-world projects sometimes, that's one of the things developers don't like to talk about lol

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Vatsal Ambastha

After losing some of my work due to a hard drive crash I started looking for ways to improve my ways further while I restored my data.

Ended up learning some CI/CD which seemed like voodoo to me earlier. I work with the Unity game engine which doesn't have a mature devops community yet. But I managed to get some CI working and kinda feel like an early adopter to this thing (in the community).

Also, learnt some verdaccio to keep my private npm packages locally.

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Ryan Glass

I asked for feedback on domain name choices for my new project (here and a few other places) and it opened my eyes to the benefit of building in the open. My original domain name choices were not the best and this was pointed out to me, so I took an extra day for a rethink with the feedback in mind and now have a domain that is much better than my original choice: twitmate.com

I've always thought that building in the open was mainly for exposure but I have learned it's great for real help with decisions along the way.

In the past I've had a build first, show when ready attitude but that is changing for this project.

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xavier

Launch my first nocode product a week ago and made my first $500 with it <3

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Mads Cordes

I spent the past 7 hours to re-write gitbird from token-secret to user-pass along with proper JWT tokens. 'twas fun. So, I learned how to JWT for realz.

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Olivia Chua

I didn't really learn any technical things this month (except running a Quasar website using docker)

From the product perspective, I am now seeing the value of product validation before exerting all your time and effort to build a product. πŸ’€ Back then I didn't have the nerve to communicate with strangers about a product idea. But I did it this time, and it feels great seeing people really interested in your product idea and joining a waitlist even though the product is not yet out there. πŸ’–

Another thing I discovered is that there are a lot of great communities and nice people. 😊

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Tintin

I have started to learn no-code two weeks ago, with Webflow. Found it incredible ! ;)

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Aleks Basara

My website copies are too passive and I'm not overselling it.

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Sergio Mattei Author

@aleksbasara How so?

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Aleks Basara

@sergio Most of my copy is written in passive language and not really clear or engaging.

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Dez Papp

@aleksbasara do you talk passive and not engaging in real life too?

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Aleks Basara

@sugardayfox Sometimes :)

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Dez Papp

@aleksbasara work on that first then, since one of the top copy advice is to "write as you speak". Then go from there.

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Macario James

I'm just getting back into the mix of regarding all things web development. I've let myself be a relative "bum" during the last six months because of the pandemic. So, while updating my various WordPress sites, I've been catching up on all the changes, updates, etc. with WP, as well as pretty much all the software I regularly use.

There's been a ton going on and i'm kinda feeling overwhelmed. But, i'm breathing and taking it one thing at a time. Basically reimplementing todo list life.

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Marin Gilles

Learned more about TailwindCSS, and it made my life so much easier.

That is actually a very good place to learn core CSS. It reduces its scope and makes it bite-sized, so that you do learn much faster, especially with the included equivalent CSS syntax.

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Petr

I started to get my first feedback for my book Efficient developer. It feels great, even if it is not all positive. This will help me to create the best book possible and I am excited to get more feedback in the next days.

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I made money online for the first time. I included Google Adsense in my blog and generated $0.75 in the last two weeks πŸ˜…

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