Frontend Mentor July 2022 review
Hello! I hope you’ve had a great month. Mine has been slightly patchy with a short break at the beginning of the month, after which I immediately came down with a nasty bout of tonsilitis, which knocked me out for a week. I then had a solid week of work before going on my first trip abroad since 2019, which I really enjoyed. We went to Morzine in France with my family, so spending time with my parents, brother, sister, and their families was great. I had lots of fun with my niece and nephews tobogganing down the mountains in the Alps!
I’ll dive into it in more detail below, but we’ve spent July focusing on making performance improvements and tidying up some of our code. Since launching the Hiring Platform and pushing the Home/Dashboard merge (more on that below!), we’re entering a period of refinement, refactoring, and process improvements. It’s always good to have periods where you take a breather and look at what needs attention within the code. Charging full steam ahead can lead to many issues down the line! I’ll talk more about our areas of focus below.
Before I dive further into what we’ve been up to, I want to welcome the 22,095 new members who have joined the Frontend Mentor platform! That’s our best month for new sign-ups, which is amazing! Also, a big hello to the 8,500+ people who have joined our Slack community 👋 It’s brilliant to see our community growing at such a rate!
Features & Updates
This past month
- Pushed the Home/Dashboard merge live — This was an update I had been excited about for a while. Since launching the Home feed and Dashboard pages at the end of last year, we immediately realised we had missed an opportunity. Instead of two separate pages, it would have been much better if we had created one central location where it’s easy to manage everything and view the most important information. We spent lots of time planning and refining this update, so I hope you like it. The feedback so far has been overwhelmingly positive, which has been great to see!
- Updated the header and footer — You’ll notice the header and footer looking a bit different from before. The footer has undergone the most changes out of the two. Adding the newsletter sign-up form into the footer means we can remove the newsletter section from a number of pages across the site.
- Made some refinements to the Hiring Platform — Since launching the Hiring Platform, we’ve been making some refinements and minor improvements. As we gather feedback from our early users, we’ll plan more significant updates to add more value to the platform.
- Improved the performance on several pages — We discovered a few pages that weren’t performing well in certain circumstances. For example, for people with many solutions or comments, then inner profile pages were sometimes taking around 10 seconds to load! This was due to how we were loading the data and how much data we were transferring. These performance issues were even causing the whole site to go down in some instances, and requests became queued. You may have seen some pages with “Undergoing maintenance” notices. These are all back up and running now and much faster. Most of all, the site’s uptime has improved since we made the changes, which is excellent!
This coming month
- Zero To Mastery partnership for August Wall of Fame — I’m delighted to announce that Zero To Mastery will sponsor August’s Mentor of the Month awards! They sponsored earlier this year in February, so it’s great to have them back. ZTM is a brilliant learning platform with loads of great courses and workshops to help boost your knowledge. This means our top 3 Mentors of the Month for August will win a one-month free subscription to the ZTM Academy!
- Improve the UX around updating and deleting solutions — We had planned to release this update last month. But the performance and site reliability issues took priority, so we focused on those instead. The plan for this change is to make it easier to edit and delete your solutions by adding dropdown menus both on the solution show page and the preview cards on the My challenges page.
- Increasing test coverage — We plan to expand our test coverage, including the addition of smoke tests to increase confidence when shipping updates. Good test coverage is a must for production applications, so we plan to boost our coverage and add more tests as we go in the future.
- Remove all V1 API endpoints — Throughout this year, we’ve shifted how we retrieve and manage data across the site to reduce payloads as much as possible. Completing this shift has taken a back seat as we’ve built the Hiring Platform and made other updates. This means some pages use the newer V2 endpoints and others use the older V1 endpoints. So, during this period, we’re moving all pages over to the V2 endpoints, which should lead to noticeable performance improvements.
- Update all pages to use our Storybook design system — We use Storybook for our design system to ensure our components are predictable and reusable. We’ve been incrementally refactoring our code to make use of it, but we’ll now take the time to move everything over to Storybook. This will help us move much faster in the future!
Wall of Fame
Mentors of the Month
Congratulations to Lucas for finishing in the top spot on the Wall of Fame for July! Also, a big congratulations to Fatlind Shehu and Elaine for finishing 2nd and 3rd, respectively. You’ve all got lovely shiny new Mentor of the Month badges on your profiles!
As mentioned above, Zero To Mastery are sponsoring August’s Mentor of the Month. So the top 3 for February will earn badges and a free one-month subscription to the Zero To Mastery learning platform!
As always, a big thanks to everyone who gave feedback and support to other community members throughout the past month. Giving code reviews is not only a great help to other people and a brilliant way to meet other community members, but it’s also incredible for your own learning.
Reading other people’s code, analysing it, and giving constructive feedback will really help boost your skills and reinforce your knowledge. Giving code reviews is a crucial part of being a professional developer, so reviewing other people’s solutions is a perfect place to practise giving helpful feedback to others!
Also, with the Hiring Platform now live, it’s also worth noting that the code reviews you give to others on the platform will play a big part in where you appear on the developer search results. Your code reviews for other people will be an incredible way to display your knowledge. This will help hiring managers get a detailed insight into you as a developer by reviewing your solutions and reading your code reviews.
Airdrop Raffle winner
Congratulations to Fatlind Shehu for winning our monthly Airdrop Raffle! Enjoy using your free premium challenge credit to take on one of our premium challenges!
Each week and month, we randomly pick someone to win a design credit (weekly) or a premium challenge credit (monthly). Every week or month you finish on the Wall of Fame, you’ll be in with a chance of winning! 🎉
Feedback and ideas welcome
If you’ve got any feedback or ideas for Frontend Mentor, please 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 enjoy the rest of your month! 🙂
