Turning 25: February Review & March Goals

February was another exciting month. It started with some of the work things that took a lot of my time. Maybe I will be able to talk about it at some point, but not now.

I had my 25th birthday on the 7th of February as well. It was lockdown in Germany so I did not have a party or something. But yeah, I can start my quarter-life crisis now. That is how it works, right?

Anyway, because of these things, I was not able to focus a lot outside of work on side projects and similar, but I have done some things that I will reflect on in this post and also put out my goals for the next month.

February Review

Blog articles on this blog

• Goal: Create 2 blog articles on this blog
• Status: 2/2 ✅

I am quite happy with the progress that happened on this page at least. Blogging does not require a big attention span, so I was still able to write some things. I released The Work Experience in a Software Engineer Resume and The Best Tech Companies in Berlin 2021. The first article is the continuation of my bigger series around writing good resumes as a software engineer. In my career, I have reviewed dozens of interviews and created many that landed people jobs at different bigger companies. From time to time I also give reviews to external people and help where I can. My personal goal for this: Bring everyone forward with their goals. The resume should not be the limiting factor. The second blog article did not go viral yet, but I created a Reddit post that went viral on the r/cscareerquestionsEU subreddit. With a little bit of marketing and backlink tracking, I could probably grow this blog article a bit.

Promote older blog articles

• Goal: Reach 3000 Users on Google Analytics for this blog
• Status: ❌

I did not really focus on growing my blog or let us say it differently: Doing the marketing to gain users. I have created new blogs that ideally should improve the search engine results. But that is something, people normally see an increase only months after they created the piece of content. Because of this, I will also focus a bit on a more actionable goal for the next month. See this later.

Finish blog article on Klarna's Engineering Blog

• Goal: Write one blog article on Klarna's Engineering Blog
• Status: ❌

Ahhhh, I still hate myself for not doing that. At work, there are stressed times right now and I did not really feel motivated to finish that piece of content. I hope that happens next month though.

Finish migration for caseconverter.pro

• Goal: Integrate react-in-out-textarea
• Status: ✅

I implemented the last features missing for caseconverter.pro in react-in-out-textarea on the last day of February. I integrated it which worked seamlessly and also redeployed the application. Redeployment of an application that you have not touched for months is definitely scary but worked out in the end. To improve this process I will work on building a proper pipeline that deploys code automatically.

Setup blog and create 1 blog article for caseconverter.pro

• Goal: Setup blog and use shared components
• Status: ❌

Another essential thing for growth for caseconverter.pro as a project is to create content. Most of the people who need a case converter are googling for such a solution. In these cases, my project should show up. For that a blog would help, that exists already but looks really horrible. I did not have time to create a proper blog though and also no time for a blog article. So let us see what is coming next.

Linkedium growth

• Goal: Finish landing page for linkedium + Get 10 people into the waitlist
• Status: ❌

Again, because of time constraints, I did not really have time for growing this. Actually, I should just launch it, but because of a different focus, I will put this on the side for now.

Create a bookmarks page

• Goal: Create a bookmarks page on my personal site here
• Status: ✅

A big goal for me was to create a bookmarks page on this page. I have done it and hope I will at some point migrate all my worthy bookmarks there. I hope it will help a lot of people as a reference list of awesome articles on how you can grow your side projects and develop your career as a software engineer because that is what this blog is mostly about.

Optional: Stabilize linkedium + enabled slide show posts

• Goal: Improve the customer experience of linkedium
• Status: ❌

The same reason as mentioned above regarding the last linkedium goal. The project is on hold for now but I might revive it at some point.

Optional: Create a free trial mechanism for getworkrecognized

• Goal: Improve onboarding flow of getworkrecognized
• Status: ❌

Because this goal is optional anyway, and I already did not have time, I never came to it. But since I want to focus less on linkedium I will probably put this goal higher up in the list again.

March Goals

Now after reviewing the February goals we can start setting some March goals. I finally have to work on generating revenue somehow. One of my main goals this year was to reach 100\$ MRR and to reach 1000 followers on Twitter. So I will focus a bit more on these goals.

Promote older blog articles

• Goal: Reach 3000 Users on Google Analytics for this blog → Create 10 twitter threads regarding old content
• Status: 👷

Combining this blog’s content with my Twitter growth would be ideal. Because I could not really grow the users on this blog I will try this approach. Direct marketing will definitely help with creating some clicks to the platform so it is worth a try. For scheduling Twitter threads I can recommend the app typefully. It is amazing and just works.

Blog articles on this blog

• Goal: Create 1 blog article on this blog
• Status: 0/1 👷

To keep this blog a bit alive, I will try to create one blog article at least. I currently have the blog post “The #1 tip to familiarize with new JavaScript Codebases” in the pipeline. It is started and structured already and will show how I navigate new codebases and do this analytical to get an advantage if onboarding is poor. This technique helped me already a lot at my day job within Klarna.

On top of that, I might add one or two more additional blog posts. But I am not sure about that yet. Let us see how this month evolves.

Bookmarks page

• Goal: Add 50 bookmarks to the bookmarks page
• Status: 0/50 (currently 10, so 60 needed) 👷

The main goal for this is to reduce the tabs opened on my mobile phone. Currently, I probably have around 300 tabs open or so with worthwhile content and I need to save it. But sharing these knowledge bits is also important. It kind of documents my growth and my goals and I want to share these things with the world. Because learning from each other is important.

Finish blog article on Klarna's Engineering Blog

• Goal: Write one blog article on Klarna's Engineering Blog
• Status: 👷

As mentioned before, that is probably the most troublesome. I really want to finish this one blog article I have in the pipeline and will see what I can do this month.

Setup blog and create 1 blog article for caseconverter.pro

• Goal: Setup blog and use shared components
• Status: 👷

Now that the initial migration for caseconverter.pro with react-in-out-textarea succeeded I can focus on growing with content. I did some SEO research and check which blog articles I can focus on:

• What is the difference between PascalCase and camelCase?
• 10 PascalCase examples in {language}
• JSON Naming Conventions
• Which case types to use in Python?
• What is the name of the hyphen-separated case?
• How to convert {case-type} to {case-type} in JavaScript?
• How to convert {case-type} to {case-type} in TypeScript?
• How to handle ACRONYMS in camelCase?
• Naming conventions in {language}
• Some excel based content

I think with this kind of content I could drive at least some people already to the website and by integrating ads I might be able to make the website self-sustainable already. Writing that amount of content will take a lot of time of course, but I am determined to do this slowly and steadily.

Create Continous deployment pipeline for caseconverter.pro

• Goal: Create a continuous deployment pipeline for caseconverter.pro
• Status: 👷

I recently tried to deploy caseconverter.pro again. It caused some problems here and there and cost more time than needed, so I decided that I will invest some time to create a simple deployment pipeline with GitHub actions. A short downtime will be there, but to be honest, usage is not high so it is likely to not matter.

Optimize onboarding flow for getworkrecognized

• Goal: Improve onboarding flow of getworkrecognized
• Status: 👷

In January I sparked some interest in geworkrecognized on hackernews. People saw the website and some people tried to signup but a lot did not complete the signup flow that currently consists of:

1. Signup with entering email + password
2. Adding billing email
3. Choosing a plan
4. Adding credit card data and billing information

Ideally, I should lower the barrier for entering. I want to create a free trial and optimize for signup via upsells. So users will actually easily sign up and try out the app for some time. Ideally, it will be a long demo of like 2 - 4 weeks so users can really see their growth over some time already. After that, I will focus on increasing the upsell rate.

So, this was the overlook of next month’s goals. Let us see what I can achieve and do not forget to ship it 🚀