This is my second scheduled weekly blog post about building in public. While during the week, I felt like I wasn't getting much done by the time it came to this blog post, I think there is some solid achievements. Two significant developments code-wise, and some substantial traffic gained.
Marketing tasks
- Released rough version of my ebook - The Missing Tech Manual - The non-technical founders' tech guide, which is currently available for what you think it's worth.
- Published a blog post on why I think people should use a SaaS Boilerplate. Read it here
- Published a blog post on To code or To NoCode. Read it here
- Engaged with community posts and helped some people. Including some people interested in my eBook.
Development tasks
- Released 1.2.0 of Parthenon
- Released the MongoDB skeleton application.
- Refactored Subscriptions and made the code dependency cleaner
- Improve database usage for SpyGather.com
- Deployed javascript error management for customers.parthenon.cloud
- Created an internal QA application
- Added more documentation
Blog Success
I got a little victory when I shared my To Code or To NoCode blog post on Hacker News. It went to the bottom of the front page for 30-50 minutes and was on the second page for most of the day.
This is not the first time I've gotten major traffic from a blog post. I've had two others previously go massive.
- PHP, isn't that, like really bad? - 12,000+ Visits in the first 24 hours
- Hiring Developers: How to avoid the best - 50,000+ visits in the first 24 hours.
One thing I've learnt is that normally, these get more traffic over time and are reshared randomly with new traffic spikes. This provides a good stream of traffic. However, because these are generic interesting blogs and not blogs related to building with Parthenon, the newsletter rates and signups are super super low. However, I still put this in the win column as people in tech are hearing about Parthenon and if they're ever in the market for Parthenon they'll already know it exists.
Moving forward
Moving forward, I'm going to continue doing more QA and building the internal QA application to handle everything. I'm also going to invest a lot of time into improving the documentation. While I'm constantly adding more documentation, often via the cookbook section, I feel like there is still lots of room for improvement. So I'm going to work on reducing the room for improvement.