Frontend Mentor January 2021 review
Hello! I don’t know about you, but January absolutely flew by for me! The UK is back in a national lockdown, so every day has seemed to blend into the other. With vaccinations now happening at a good pace, it does feel like returning to some sense of normality is within reach. However, I’m not counting my chickens before they’ve hatched! I hope you’re managing to stay well wherever you are.
January was a busy month on Frontend Mentor. I’m guessing it’s a mixture of new year’s resolutions with people wanting to code more, plus I saw the site getting shared around quite a bit. Either way, we had our best month ever for new sign-ups…by far! Before last month, our best month for new members was 8,612 sign-ups. In January alone, we welcomed 14,859 new members to the community!!
So I just wanted to say a big hello to everyone who has joined the community in the past month! 👋
One result of this amazing jump in sign-ups is that we’ve now got over 100,000 members registered on the platform! This is a truly incredible milestone to hit, and I still can’t quite believe it’s happened.
To celebrate reaching 100,000 members on the platform I’m excited to announce Community Spotlights! 🎉
With so many people in the community, I’d love to start highlighting the stories of some of our most prominent community members. It will be a chance to get to know their background, experiences within web development, and advice for other developers.
I’m thrilled to say that Grace is going to be our first member in the Spotlight! We’ll be having a chat on YouTube Live diving into Grace’s web development experiences and answering questions from the community. We’re yet to finalise a time and date, so keep an eye out for an update.
Now, let’s get into what we’ve been up to and what we’ve got planned…
Features & Updates
This past month
- Remove the Beta badge from the site — We have (finally!) removed the beta badge from our site! Having launched the platform back in April 2019, I wanted to keep the beta badge on the site until I was happy with the underlying foundations and UX. Normally, beta status means it’s possible there could still be big shifts, so while there were big changes to be made, I decided to keep it on. With the launch of Challenge Hubs in December, I feel the platform now has an extremely stable foundation. There are still so many improvements to be made and so many ideas I’ve got. But everything now will hopefully be extensions of the underlying structure, as opposed to huge shifts.
- Plan for the next phase of development — After Hubs’ launch, I wanted to take a step back to plan the next development phase. We could add so many potential things to the platform, but I want to make sure we’re adding the right things. So it’s been great to review everything and start thinking about next steps. I’m excited to share what we’ve got in store!
I was hoping to start work on the UI update you might have seen me talking about in Slack’s design channel. Due to the knock-on effects, those changes would have elsewhere on the platform; I decided to hold off. Many other admin-style tasks took up a huge amount of my time last month. Things like reviewing the current points system, finding a better approach, filming a workshop for another company, and launching new challenges. To allow me to focus on the upcoming changes, we’ll actually be reducing the rate at which we launch new challenges to once every two weeks instead of once a week. This will give me more time to spend improving the platform and making updates. As soon as I’m able to move back to a new challenge every week, I will 🙂
This coming month
- Make UI updates — Now the UI designs are all done for updates to our profile page, and the preview items for solutions, challenges, and resources, I can get to work building! So expect to see some UI updates on the platform over the coming month ✨
- Clear todos from our Sprint Backlog — We have 4 boards to help organise tasks: Ideas & Feature Requests, Roadmap, Product Backlog, and the Sprint Backlog. Updates start on the Ideas & Feature Requests board and then move through to the Sprint Backlog. At the moment, our Sprint Backlog todo column is full of small tasks that I’ve been de-prioritising for too long. This month, I aim to clear the todo column, so we’ve got a blank slate to start from next month when we start focusing on bigger updates. To give you an idea of some of these tasks, here are a few 1) Add optional Slack username field to profile 2) Update and improve content for sharing solutions 3) Re-shuffle challenge difficulties to move some to Guru-level. As you can see, nothing too exciting, but these are all improvements that need to be made and will be good to get done before the next big update.
This will be another month of small updates, except for the UI updates which should be pretty noticeable! I’ve also got a decent amount of finance stuff to sort out now that we’ve got real accountants (fun times!).
Mentor of the Month
A massive congratulations to Szymon Rojek for winning the first Mentor of the Month award for 2021! Szymon has only been on the platform for just over a month, so it’s been amazing seeing him diving in and giving feedback to others so quickly. As you’ll see from Szymon’s profile, he’s been giving some amazing code reviews and has been helping a lot of people on the platform!
Also, a big congrats to Grace and ApplePieGiraffe for finishing 2nd and 3rd respectively! There was so much amazing feedback flying around on the platform last month. It’s always so nice seeing people supporting others. If you haven’t posted a comment on someone else’s solution yet, I strongly recommend diving in. By providing feedback to others, you’re not only giving back to the community but reading other people’s code and giving feedback is also an incredible way to deepen your own knowledge!
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! 🙂
