Progress, progress, progress

March was a really good month. I kind of got back into side projects and it shows in the results. I still did not finish all tasks but that is fine because I am super happy with myself. The time currently is a bit difficult. I am living in Germany and we have a lockdown for almost 5 months, mostly restricting private meetings with friends. That gets to me, but I am trying my hardest to get through it. So let us focus on business.

March Review

The march goals were quite intensive but I reached many of them which feel good. Overall march was a lot better than February because I could focus more again on my side project and life.

On another note, I got a lot of good feedback about my blog articles and what content people like. It was really good to hear this feedback and validated this blog's existence, which is great to see.

Promote older blog articles

• Goal: Create 10 twitter threads regarding old content
• Status: ✅ but ❌

I have not created 10 threads. I was motivated initially but then lost motivation to create that many threads. You can see a list of my threads here:

• Berlin's tech scene over the past 4 years
• Get contributors during Hacktoberfest
• 5 of my bookmarks

The original goal was to achieve more site views and achieved this, not because of the Twitter thread but because of something else that I will mention in the next chapter.

Blog articles on this blog

• Goal: Create 1 blog article on this blog
• Status: 1/1 ✅

I created the blog article "The #1 tip to familiarize with new JavaScript Codebases" which was a huge success. It was featured in the "JavaScript Weekly" newsletter and it brought a lot of attention to this blog.

In the long term, I hope this blog article will bring people to my blog but I can see a lot of other things as well.

Bookmarks page

• Goal: Add 50 bookmarks to the bookmarks page
• Status: 56/50 (10 in March) ✅

Wohooo, I did it. The bookmarks page took a lot of time, to be honest. I added 56 resources which are amazing and I hope it will help other people to discover.

I did optimize some SEO around the site as well, like not hiding content in the HTML but only with CSS so the Google bot will see it. And from the tips, I will refer a lot I believe. It also helped my Chrome browser on my phone to finally run smoothly again. But we will not stop here yet!

Finish blog article on Klarna's Engineering Blog

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

I think I will cry about this every time. On a positive note, I animated another team to write an engineering blog about their product which is super cool and I am also working with some other people to publish another blog article regarding Klarna's engineering graduate program. I think both articles will be super helpful, but there is still a lot of work to be done. Let us see how it can be combined with the work of the next month.

Setup blog and create 1 blog article for caseconverter.pro

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

The new blog and a new blog article are live: What's the name for hyphen-separated case?. It is based on StackOverflow answers and upvotes, so I have decided to use this article to write first. If it pays off, we will see in the following months but I plan to push a lot more content, so the site is at least self-sustainable through ads.

Create Continous deployment pipeline for caseconverter.pro

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

In a blog article that I read, I saw it is quite easy to deploy a web app via an SSH action. I created such a GitHub action in the repository of caseconverter.pro that automatically deploys it now. Since I am not using docker and anything of the fancy stuff, downtime is expected with every redeploy, but I do not have to remember how to connect to the production server.

Optimize onboarding flow for getworkrecognized

Goal: Improve onboarding flow of getworkrecognized Status: 👷

This is something I still work on. I started around a week ago with implementing an email login and it kind of works in the local environment, email verification included. But I have to polish a lot of things regarding that and also just then I can focus on the actual onboarding flow, convincing the users to sign up.

April outlook

Overall, March was really great as you can see. Mostly I reached the goals that I made but need to reevaluate what I can do better. On top of all the goals, I also achieved many other things. For example, I got a lot more reviews of getworkrecognized in. Super valuable feedback from Indie Hackers and Twitter.

On another note, at Klarna we had a hackathon regarding internal tooling, and a lot of great projects resulted from that hackathon. Some of them got open sourced already like platform-colors, which is a library to generate platform native colors, or postgres-to-docs, that generates markdown tables of your PostgreSQL schemas. Really really useful for projects in bigger companies. I also worked with a team and created a tool to manage our secrets at Klarna in an Electron application. It was a great opportunity to learn about Electron and how it works. Really useful. And we even won one of the prizes.

Within Klarna we also created an #indie-makers channel to share our personal projects. I will be more active there for sure because I simply like to build side projects. I also got the feedback I should focus more on Linkedium, but let us see how caseconverter.pro and getworkrecognized are doing this month. So let us jump into the goals of April.

Promote blog articles

• Goal: Create 3 Twitter threads of blog articles and create 3 image slides for LinkedIn & Facebook
• Status: ❌

I saw a lot of growth in the last month on this blog because of the new article The #1 tip to familiarize with new JavaScript Codebases. This will most like not to continue so I have to reiterate some older blog content of mine. I had some kind of success with sharing my content in Facebook and LinkedIn groups last month, so I will try to do this for the next month for some older content to promote this even more.

Create one blog article on the blog

• Goal: Create one blog article in April 2021
• Status: ❌ 0/1

Creating content is key to grow this blog. I am always trying to add bookmarks, but it only helps so much. Writing blog articles and sharing knowledge helps the most. In the last month, I had many people reaching out to me telling me how my blog helped them. It is a really great feeling. Thanks a lot for that :)

So for the next month, I am not sure what to write. I analyzed a bit on what would bring traffic and I am not decided between:

• "Let your Projects section shine" - a part of the software engineer resume series
• "ES6 remove property from object" or "TypeScript - conditionally add a property to object" - super similar blog articles to what I have, but they would bring in tons of traffic I believe
• "How to write a good GitHub readme" - After crafting multiple GitHub readmes I want to share my tips on how you can get the most out of it.

So not really sure what I will write about, but be prepared, it will be something interesting.

Create a newsletter of this blog, every two weeks/monthly

• Goal: Create a newsletter
• Status: ❌

A colleague of mine, Robin Pokorny, recently created a newsletter on revue and I want to try the same. I think I share a lot of content, but the consistency is missing and especially for the returning users. I have a really high bounce rate on Google and with a newsletter, I might be able to convert some users into returning users again.

Bookmarks Page

• Goal: Add 50 bookmarks
• Status: ❌ 66/116 (currently: 66, need to add 50)

After adding many bookmarks in March I want to continue doing this in April. As mentioned before I have countless tabs open on my mobile phone that I want to migrate. So here we go with another list of bookmarks to be migrated.

Growing caseconverter.pro

Goal: Create 1 Blog Article Status: ❌

I have migrated the blog of caseconverter.pro to a shared design I am also using for linkedium. Ideally, I share these components finally with the world. Maybe even publish it for payment. Let me see what I will do with that this month. But otherwise, I want to create at least one blog article. I have researched some SEO things and these options are out there:

• How to change JSON keys in JavaScript
• How to change JSON keys online
• "Change snake_case to camelCase in express automatically" - Based on this StackOverflow Question
• "camelCase, PascalCase or snake_case in JSON APIs?" - Based on this StackOverflow question
• "How to delimit words in URIs?" - Based on this StackOverflow question

How did I come up with these ideas? 2 Sources: One is the Google Search console data. Based on what gives a lot of impressions but not a lot of clicks, these are the opportunities you should create content for if there is not a lot of good content regarding that on google.

Otherwise, for caseconverter.pro which is a technical project I am looking up questions on StackOverflow. StackOverflow has the tendency to give people a lot of outdated answers. Especially when it comes to JavaScript or TypeScript which I will focus on in my blog articles.

Growth of getworkreconized.com

In this month I will also focus a bit more on this side project. To be honest I still cannot believe no one signed up yet. I will try for some more months and see what comes out of this.

• Goal: Enable Email/Password register + login
• Status: 👷

People complained a long time already that only GitHub and Google logins are offered so I am working on a possibility to log in via email and password. Email verification is probably the most difficult thing and there are still some things I have to implement now like Google reCAPTCHA. I started this process in the last month already so I just have to continue on this.

• Goal: Trial without credit card
• Status: 👷

I have a lot of people actually signing up but bouncing when needing to enter the credit card. I think the value of the platform is huge when it is used so I will create trials without credit cards even now. 30 days and then someone has to pay for the platform. Regarding the 30 days, I am not sure yet because value should be just provided after a long period but yeah optimizations can be done later.

• Goal: Optimize the signup/login page
• Status: ❌

Pieter Levels from NomadList ran many experiments on which signup page converted the most. It was kind of crowded with the content of testimonials and users, so I will try to improve that as well.

• Goal: Optimize the landing page
• Status: ❌

In the feedback I got for getworkrecognized I should focus more on the outcomes that can be achieved with the tool and tell personal stories. The landing page can be optimized for this a bit more.

• Goal: Optimize the example self-review
• Status: ❌

I think I need to show the process of how the application works in a condensed form. I was thinking about a bit bigger page describing a story. Not sure how I will design it, but I think it would show the value of the application a bit better.

• Goal: Lower prices
• Status: ❌

Also, a reason why people might not sign up. I am considering lowering the prices to 4€ or so per month. I think with a lot more individual customers I can grow better because I will get more feedback.

• Goal: Create a blog article on getworkrecognized
• Status: ❌

To increase the SEO value, I will write one blog article: "How I got promoted from Junior to Senior within 2.5 years at Klarna". It basically describes the story of how I got promoted at Klarna from Junior to Senior and how I have used the tool to enable and showcase my growth.

Klarna's Engineering Blog

• Goal: Finish the blog regarding technical design documents
• Status:👷

Still not finished. I am depressed about that. I simply could not find time to create this article but I got 2 groups of people that want to write articles which is a great process.

Conclusion

I am really looking forward to work on all the topics that I want to write about and do. I hope you find this review somehow useful. Thanks for reading this.