2022 year in review for Frontend Mentor
I'm a little late writing a review of last year, but I'm excited to recap the major things we did and look forward to 2023!
We've come a long way in the space of 12 months. This is the first full year that Mike and I have worked full-time on Frontend Mentor together. This has led to considerable improvements in the quality of our codebases and processes as Mike has had more time to give his input and shape how we work.
Frontend Mentor is starting to look like a real company rather than a side project, which is fantastic to see!
On that note, I have some extremely exciting news to kick off this review. At the end of last year, we applied to participate in a business accelerator programme called TinySeed. It's a 12-month accelerator where you go into a cohort and receive lots of mentorship and guidance. The main reason we applied was for the mentorship and community side of the programme. As a founder, I want to ensure that I'm doing everything I can to make Frontend Mentor a success and make as few mistakes as possible. I'm delighted to say that we were accepted into TinySeed, and we started our cohort in November last year!
The programme is off to an excellent start, and we've already learned a lot and met some incredible founders building fascinating businesses. As you know, I'm a big fan of mentorship and having access to a community for support, so TinySeed fits in perfectly with that. Having the TinySeed team and community giving us founder support will only be positive for Frontend Mentor as we continue to grow.
Now, let's look at what we got up to last year!
Business Overview
We started 2022 with just over 250K registered members on the platform. I set a somewhat arbitrary and ambitious goal of getting to 500K registered members for 2023. Well, I'm delighted to say we hit the goal! Today, there are over 530k people who have signed up on the Frontend Mentor platform, which is incredible!
The community continues to grow at an excellent rate, so we're planning to focus on getting more people to start and submit their first solution. We want people to reach the "aha!" moment for why building projects is such a powerful way to learn and master coding skills.
On a business front, everything is looking great. Mike and I are working full-time on Frontend Mentor, and we have Josh (front-end coding) and Kevin (design) working part-time. The plan is to grow the team further in 2023 as revenue allows. I dream of building a small full-time team to help developers worldwide improve their skills and get hired. So, hopefully, in 2023, we'll take some more steps towards that!
Features & Improvements
Hiring Platform soft-launch
We spent a big chunk of the beginning of 2022 in build mode, working on the first version of our Hiring Platform. The plan was to create a platform that companies join to discover developers from within the Frontend Mentor community who are looking for work.
In the summer, we opened the platform up to our first recruiters to get feedback before the larger public launch. Initial feedback was extremely positive, but there were several recommendations for updates to make before launching the platform more publicly and promoting it. Being a two-person full-time team and juggling work on the main and the Hiring platforms was difficult, so things moved slower than we would have liked. But I'm happy to say that we're now making the final adjustments to the platform and aim to launch it publicly in the coming months. I can't wait to see a steady stream of developers from within our community getting hired by companies!
I'll keep you updated as things progress on the build-up to the public launch.
A new Home feed
We made a substantial update to the Home feed, which we're extremely happy with. Earlier in 2022, the Home feed looked pretty dull and uninspiring. We also had critical information spread between the Home feed and the Dashboard page, so there was no central location to get an overview of the essential information on FEM. So, we fixed it!
After the update, the Home feed now looks like this:
In the updated feed, it's easy to see critical information like
- Feed items relevant to you (people you follow, challenges you've completed, tags you follow).
- An overview of your stats and credits.
- Highlights of the most active community members for this week, month, and year on the Wall of Fame.
- Links to helpful articles to help you make the most of Frontend Mentor.
Challenge Hubs UI/UX update
The Challenge Hub page used to be the most confusing page on the site. The page's goal was always to help everyone manage the most critical areas related to a challenge (e.g. downloading files, submitting/editing/deleting solutions, and seeing community solutions for a particular challenge). However, it could have been done better. So we decided to update the page to give it a fresh and more focused look, which you can see below:
The updated layout is much more straightforward, making it easy to keep track of your solutions for a specific challenge and see other people's attempts once you've submitted your own.
Ecologi API integration
Mike and I are incredibly passionate about using Frontend Mentor to help contribute to causes we care deeply about. Business is more than just making money. You can leverage revenue to feed back into worthwhile causes that impact the world beyond the company's primary function.
We're both passionate about helping reduce climate change as much as we can, so this was an area we wanted to focus on mainly to start. This led to us integrating with Ecologi's API, so trees are planted for every new and renewed subscription on the platform. Ecologi is an incredible organisation that runs many high-impact projects, including planting and maintaining trees worldwide. If you're interested in discovering more about what projects we've helped fund since our API integration, you can check out our virtual forest on Ecologi's site. To date, we've funded the planting of over 11,000 trees!
Added a multi-step modal pattern
One of our goals is to provide more information and guidance on the platform. We decided to introduce a new multi-step modal pattern, which will be used at various moments on the site. Our first addition was to add it when a new challenge is started to help people get set up on the project. We've had excellent feedback so far, which has been great to see! Here's how it looks:
Significant improvements in our front-end development processes
Throughout the year, we made substantial improvements in our development processes. These will help us move faster in the future and maintain higher code standards to ensure we're pushing fewer bugs.
Some of these changes included:
- Creating a shared component library. This helps us keep modular, composable components that are shared between our main platform and the new Hiring Platform.
- Implementing Redux Toolkit. Adding Redux Toolkit has allowed us to significantly reduce the amount of code we use for state management. It's provided us with an opinionated framework to follow, which has been a considerable benefit.
- Increasing test coverage on the front-end. Our API code has always been well-tested, but our front-end test coverage left something to be desired. So we focused on boosting test coverage to ensure we have more confidence in our code when making updates.
Summary
We've made many big and small changes to help move Frontend Mentor forward over the past year, and we're proud of our progress. We've hit a good rhythm in our workflow, so hopefully, things will move even faster in the year ahead!
Mentors of the Year
We saw a huge increase in the number of people giving feedback on the platform in 2022. This is something we will always work to improve because reading other people’s code and giving feedback to others is such a critical part of mastering your own coding skills. You learn much more by teaching others, plus other community members benefit from your feedback. So it’s a win-win!
Many people gave consistent feedback and support to others on the platform throughout the year, but three people really stood out.
Lucas, who was awarded the Mentor of the Year 1st place badge, gave others unbelievable support and feedback. At the time of writing, Lucas has written 8,088 comments on other people’s solutions! Congratulations, Lucas, for earning the top spot on the Wall of Fame for 2022!
バレンタイン and Adriano earned 2nd and 3rd place, respectively, after also showing up consistently to support other community members. Having community members who are so happy to support each other is what makes Frontend Mentor so great!
As a sign of our appreciation, all three will be given free one-year access to PRO and a free one-year subscription to Scrimba, who agreed to partner with us for the Mentor of the Year awards!
I’m pleased to say that the same prizes will also be awarded to the top 3 Mentors of the Year for 2023!
Looking forward to 2023
The year ahead is going to be an exciting one! We have three major areas where we’ll focus:
The Hiring Platform
We’re planning to do the public launch of the Hiring Platform in the coming months, which we can’t wait for. We plan to proactively go out and find companies who would be a good fit for hiring from within the Frontend Mentor community and get them signed up for the platform.
Our mission is to become a major on-ramp to tech for developers worldwide, so the Hiring Platform is a critical part of helping us achieve our goals.
We want it so that by being active and engaged on Frontend Mentor, people can get themselves in front of companies looking to hire developers. Our aim is to have a steady stream of developers from within our community getting hired and finding their feet as professional developers.
Increased guidance and support
One of the benefits of Frontend Mentor is that we enable you to face realistic development problems and problem-solve like a professional developer. If you get completely stuck, you have the community to fall back on and ask questions. However, we want to provide more support to ensure people don’t get lost at the first step and never reach the “aha!” moment of why building projects is such a powerful way to improve and master coding skills.
I won’t give too many details here, as we haven’t finalised anything yet. But we’re planning ways to increase the chances of getting feedback, getting more resources to help get unstuck on challenges, and giving more guidance as to what challenges to take for different goals.
Summary
Our primary focus will be to get the ball rolling on the Hiring Platform. If we can have a range of companies using it as a place to discover talent by this time next year, then I will be extremely happy!
Please let me know if you have any questions about our plans for the year ahead. As always, the best place to stay updated on what we’re doing and chat with me is inside our Slack community. I hope you have an excellent year ahead!
