Frontend Mentor April 2020 Review

Another month has absolutely flown by! I’m not quite sure where time is going at the moment but I’m feeling much less productive at the moment. Are you feeling the same at all? Perhaps it’s just me!

I’m handling the lockdown fine (I think) but I’m finding myself getting distracted more often and not able to focus on deep work like I used to. I feel like I need to re-read Make Time as my productivity took a huge jump after reading it a while back and implementing their suggested tactics!

During April, I also taught my first ever remote coding Bootcamp which was an interesting and exciting experience! Going into the week I wasn’t sure how the online delivery would work out. But I found there were actually some benefits to teaching via Zoom over teaching in a classroom. One of the major benefits was collaborative troubleshooting. If anyone had an error during a code along they’d screen share while we fixed it. What this meant was that everyone could see the debugging process on screen and see some common errors to look out for. Don’t get me wrong, I’d much prefer to teach in-person but this made me realise that live online workshops really do work well. You never know, it could pave the way for some “Frontend Mentor Live” workshops in the future! 🙂

OK, let’s have a look at what I’ve been up to this month for Frontend Mentor and what’s to come…

Features & Updates

As I mentioned above, April was a tough month for productivity. As a result, I haven’t hit the goals I set in the last review.

This past month

• Enabled liking/bookmarking from index pages — This seems like quite a small thing but I’ve already seen the benefit of it on the site. Before, to like or bookmark a solution, you’d have to go to the solution page to do it. This meant you couldn’t like or bookmark any projects from the index pages or profile pages of solution authors. Enabling this has meant it’s much easier to like/bookmark solutions across the site. I’m also planning to make it easier to navigate from one solution to another without going back to the index page which will be a nice addition. I won’t implement this immediately though, so it will be a little while before it’s added.
• Big update to the resources page — I added a bunch of new resources to the /resources page. Here’s a Twitter thread I posted listing out all of the new additions.
• We popped up in some newsletters and articles — It was awesome seeing Frontend Mentor get mentioned on some sites and newsletters that I follow. It happened first in the Codrops Collective and then one morning I woke up to find that Chris Coyier had featured us in a CSS Tricks article about front-end challenges. There were a few others but these two were especially great to see!
• Review solution submission process — This is something I’m working on at the moment, and I’m excited to put the changes live. I’m continuing to talk to members of the community about this to make sure the changes work well. Hopefully, it will help solution authors reflect more on their learnings and ask more specific questions about their solution to get help from others.
• Review overall direction for the platform — As soon as I started reviewing the solution submission process I decided to take a step back and think about the platform from a higher level first. My aim with Frontend Mentor is to build the platform into a collaborative space where it’s rewarding and fun to be a part of the community submitting solutions and giving others feedback. This actually ended up taking around a week itself to really dive into! As soon as the ideas started flowing I just decided to stick with it and get everything down. I’ve got a load of new ideas but I want to make sure we’re building the right functionality that will have the highest impact on the overall experience. So I’ll be chatting to a lot of you to hear more about your goals and pain points with the platform as it is to see what needs to be prioritised. I’m really excited by the loose plan I’ve got though and can’t wait to start refining the platform and adding valuable functionality!

This coming month

I’m going to really try to have a more productive month in May. Overall, I’m happy with what I did in April. As you’ve heard it was mostly thinking and planning for the platform. I love coding so much, so it’s hard to close down VS Code and plan. But that’s what I need to do. There would be no point in creating new features if what I’m building is useless! 😅

So, here’s what I’m planning to work on this month:

• Create a page for the Mentor of the Month award — I was aiming to do this last month but didn’t get round to it. I’ve drawn up the wireframe and it’s now being designed, so I’ll look to build this next week.
• Finalise layout for new solution submission form — I’m nearly there with the new solution submission form. The next step will be to take it to the design and build stage. Altering how solutions are submitted will also mean the solution page, solution preview cards throughout the site, and questions on the dashboard appear. So I’ll be wireframing those and getting the designs done too. The site will look quite different when these changes go live!
• Add a welcome email sequence — This will only apply to new sign-ups but it’s an important addition. I want to help onboard new community members to give more information on how to get the most out of the platform.

After diving into all aspects of the solution updates, I think this will take up a good chunk of the month. So, if I can complete these 3 tasks along with all of the smaller bug fixes and recurring tasks I’ll be happy. I’m also teaching for a week again during May which will take away a week of work on the platform.

Mentor of the Month

Every month I award a member of our community the Mentor of the Month award. It’s a small token of appreciation to someone who has been heavily involved in helping others and providing support and feedback on solutions.

I’m really pleased to say that Gerben Dol has won it for April! 🥳

Gerben has been extremely active in the Slack community and on the platform. He may well have even helped you!

If you would like to be in with a chance of winning MotM and a free premium challenge please dive in and start giving others feedback and help. It’s been awesome to see new faces on the site giving some awesome feedback, so all inputs are welcome!

Thank you so much to everyone who is active in the community helping others out. It’s always amazing to see such great feedback and support being offered!

Community sponsors for May

Finally, I want to give a massive thank you to our community sponsors for May! These are all companies and products that I personally love and would strongly recommend checking out.

• Vercel offers an amazing website hosting service, which is super simple to set up. Just connect your GitHub account, point to a repo and your site will be deployed. Perfect for your website and frontend hosting needs — especially since it’s free to get started!
• Sizzy is an extremely useful browser designed specifically to improve a developer’s workflow when building websites. You can fire up multiple device emulators and run them all in sync while building out your web pages. Perfect for helping build fully responsive websites!
• Dracula PRO is a beautiful dark theme to help keep you focused and productive while you code. The theme isn’t just for your editor either. You can also apply it to your most-used apps like your terminal and even Slack!

I hope you have a brilliant and productive month ahead. If you’ve got any feedback or suggestions, please do feel free to let me know. I’m always interested in hearing your thoughts.

Until next month, happy coding! 🙂