Frontend Mentor December 2020 review
Well. 2020 is finally over! What a strange, challenging and draining year that was! As I’m sure you are, I’m really hoping 2021 will start to turn it around for what has been a pretty shocking start to the decade. 2020 set a low bar, so surely the only way is up from here! 🤞
It’s been a very bittersweet year for me personally. With all the madness happening in the world, it’s been hard to stay positive and focused. As I’m sure is the same for so many people, not being able to see family and friends and spending most of the year fairly isolated has certainly taken its toll. However, circumstances also pushed me to double-down on Frontend Mentor. No matter how isolating 2020 was, it’s been absolutely incredible to have such an amazing community to spend my time in. Everything that happened last year has only made me more certain that Frontend Mentor is the exact project that I should be working on.
This culminated in me going full-time on the business last month! It’s an incredible feeling to know that I’ll be waking up every day working on Frontend Mentor and helping our amazing community reach their goals. So for me personally, 2020 ended on a high and I can’t wait to keep pushing the business and the community forward in 2021.
Mentor of the Year
We’ll start off by saying a MASSIVE congratulations to ApplePieGiraffe and Connor Z for finishing 1st and 3rd respectively on the yearly Wall of Fame for 2020! Not only have they been diving in and supporting other community members with feedback, but they’ve been submitting incredible solution after incredible solution. A couple of my personal favourites are:
- APG’s Todo App With Christmas Theme, Local Storage | Svelte, Sortable.js
- Connor’s Photosnap multi-page website | Built with Sapper
The attention to detail and added extras, like animations or the Christmas theme in APG’s case, are always a joy to see.
As a token of my appreciation, I’ll be giving APG and Connor a free one-year subscription to Frontend Mentor PRO. As I came in 2nd, I’ll also be giving a one-year free PRO subscription to Adarsh Pratap who finished the year in 4th!
I’ll be looking to add some more prizes for the top 3 Mentors of the Year for 2021 on top of the free yearly PRO subscription, so keep an eye out for updates!
On a side note, I’d also like to say a huge congrats to Connor who has just landed a new role! It’s amazing to see Connor’s hard work and persistence pay off. He even said that his Frontend Mentor challenge solutions played a key part in getting his foot in the door to get interviews!
Features & Updates
This past month
I only gave myself two major things to focus on last month. They were pretty big tasks, so I want to be sure I stayed focused and got them finished. I’m happy to say that I managed it! Here’s some more info…
- UI/UX updates — There were a number of fundamental changes that needed to be made to the site. A big one was what used to be called the Dashboard. It was hard to see at a glance what challenge someone had submitted a solution for. The layout was also not very optimal for presenting solutions. You can see from the image below that we’ve now moved to a 3-column masonry layout that shows full-height screenshots of each solution. There’s still some work to do to clean up the UI for this, but it’s definitely a move in the right direction. You’ll also notice that the secondary navigation has been moved from a sidebar on the left to the second layer of the header. This is a pattern we’ll now consistently use throughout the site so it’s easy to find the secondary navigation for any page that uses it.
- Challenge hubs — This was an update that I’ve been looking forward to making for a long time. There was a big architectural problem with the platform before this update. Before I added hubs, you’d start a challenge, go and complete your solution, and then submit your solution. However, there was no central location to do things like download files, submit your solution, and (very importantly!) view solutions for a specific challenge. Hubs aim to solve that problem by creating this central location for each challenge. By default, access to each challenge’s hub is locked. You need to start the challenge on the platform to then unlock access to the hub. This solves a bunch of architectural issues with the platform and will hopefully provide the underlying foundations for us to build on for the future. There’s still a lot of work to be done with hubs. I’d love to hear your feedback and ideas for what you’d like to see in them. The possibilities are pretty much endless!
- Removed sponsors — I’ve enjoyed having Community Sponsors on Frontend Mentor, but trying to track down new sponsors was hard work and also not very enjoyable. I don’t know whether I’m just not great at sales or whether it’s because my heart wasn’t really in it, but I haven’t managed to make sponsors work. Now that the PRO subscription is up and running I’d much prefer to focus my time on improving the subscription offering than chasing down potential new sponsors.
This coming month
As I like to do after any big platform update, I’m going to spend January clearing a bunch of small tickets like bugs, small improvements, etc. I’ll also be doing fun things like sorting out our accountancy software 😅
The larger tasks/milestones I’ll be looking to complete are:
- Remove the Beta badge from the site — When software moves out of beta it’s typically seen as being structurally sound. The beta stage is typically a time of big changes and potential product overhauls to refine the offering and make sure it’s useful. With the addition of hubs, I now feel like we’ve reached the stage where we have a solid underlying architecture to the platform. There’s still a lot of work to be done to keep improving and evolving the site to help you achieve your goals. But the vast majority of updates now should be incremental builds and improvements on top of the current structure. So I’ll (finally!) be removing the beta status from the site!
- Update profile page UI — The layout of the profile page doesn’t work very well at the moment, especially with the new UI for the solutions. Some of you may have seen me add a couple of design mockups in the #design channel in Slack to get your opinions. This design discovery work has uncovered a much better layout for the profile page. It’s also uncovered a potential new look for individual solution items, which will also have knock-on effects for the UI throughout the platform for things like the challenge items and resource items. I’ll be focusing on the overall layout of the profile first, but in the coming months, we’ll also do a design audit of the site to see what updates could be made to improve the UI.
- Plan for the next phase of development — There’s a lot of potential possibilities of what to work on next. I’ll be spending a lot of time this month re-working our Trello boards and re-prioritising tasks. It may not sound massively exciting, but it’s a task I really enjoy. We’ve got our roadmap categorised into Now, Next, Later columns, but I love diving into the detail of cards we haven’t fully fleshed out yet and figuring out what needs to be done.
So this month will be all about small tasks and getting ready for the next phase of development.
Mentor of the Month
Last month was the most active month we’ve ever had with solution comments, which is amazing to see! Frontend Mentor isn’t just about submitting solutions. There is SOOO much to be learned by reading other people’s code, giving them feedback and talking about code.
This is a message that I’m going to aim to get across better on the platform itself, as anyone who is not commenting on other people’s code is potentially missing out on a huge learning opportunity.
3 people who have been giving loads of amazing feedback and supporting others are ApplePieGiraffe, Abhik, and Front-end Master. So a big congrats to the 3 of them for being the Mentors of the Month for December!
A massive thanks to everyone who has been commenting on other people’s solutions and answering questions in the Slack community. Supporting each other and helping others improve is what Frontend Mentor is all about!
Feedback and ideas welcome
If you’ve got any feedback or ideas for Frontend Mentor, please do let me know. I love hearing how you’re using the platform. The best place to message me would be to DM in the Slack community.
I hope you have a great month ahead! 🙂
