After a rough week last week, we made some progress on Dev CheatSheets this week!
I was able to really lock in this week and knock out some features. I’m forcing myself to find time amidst contract work, full-time work and more to bang out some code on Dev CheatSheets, and this week I really feel like I found a rhythm.
Dev CheatSheets
I decided to majorly simplify my data model for Dev CheatSheets, a decision that I hope I won’t regret later. I’m going to have a Tags table that’s just a list of the tags, a Snippet table that’s a list of Snippets that have a field that’s a list of the tags and a Link table that has a field that’s a list of the tags. I might do away with the Tags table entirely, now that I think about it, but I’ll whiteboard that out later.
Prisma has been a really awesome resource for my backend. Building out a schema and mapping API request data to Prisma models has been super helpful.
The fun part comes this weekend: I need to build out a personal page feed as well as a general public feed of posts. This is where I’m going to need to optimize my backend API calls, perfect my data model and, unfortunately, perfect my design. Because this… isn’t going to fly
On the marketing side, I haven’t done much. I’ve slowly grown my Twitter presence, but I’ve neglected the full-on product marketing in favor of coding (which has been a habit of mine, unfortunately) this week. So, here’s my plan:
Pushing some SEO to prod - Right now, all of my dev work has been in a non-public branch, so the production page hasn’t changed much. I’m going to push a blog to Dev CheatSheets (probably using Feather) and start pushing content there, and do some heavy reading on programmatic SEO to start pulling traffic to Dev CheatSheets.
Developing a product/content marketing tempo - Devlogs have taken a hit this week as I just haven’t had time to sit down and write/record. Next week, I’m going to develop a sustainable tempo to put out content on Twitter, YouTube and the blog.
Start monitoring search more closely - I honestly can’t even tell you how I’m doing on SEO now as is, to be fair, because I haven’t been monitoring my search rankings at all.
As for metrics:
Pretty slow week, which is to be expected for a week where I did zero marketing. YouTube remains a pretty steady source of traffic, which is good, but I definitely want to build up that Google traffic source.
On to the Dev Cheats!
Dev Cheats
Rust
I found this really awesome interactive cheat sheet for Rust that I’ve started to use. It’s really slick and makes finding docs for Rust insanely simple.
Web Development/JavaScript
This is less of a code snippet and more of an approach, I’ve started putting my Tailwind classes into a separate file and importing them into my components. This might be bad practice, not recommended, etc. but I genuinely don’t care because of how much it’s cleaned up my component code.
var text_input_classes = "mt-5 w-full mb-5 rounded-md bg-white bg-opacity-20 text-black border-2 border-primary border-opacity-40 py-2"
var button_classes = "mx-auto border-2 border-primary rounded-md px-5 py-2 mt-5 mb-2 hover:bg-primary hover:text-white"
export {text_input_classes, button_classes};
So I’ll have a styles.ts
file with something like the above and just import it into whatever file uses those styles. This simplifies my code, moves the ugly blocks of class names out of my components, and lets me standardize a bit easier.
Again, JavaScript/TypeScript nerds like to get really uppity about best practices and code styles and such, so this might not be “The Right Way ™️” but it’s the way I am going to keep doing it.
General Development
I recently found Learn How To Learn from the author @dnbt777 and have fallen in love with one of the blog posts on developing things fast. The approach of rapidly outlining code in an iterative and recursive fashion to develop things quickly is brilliant and helped me lock in on a ton of code this week.
I’d also recommend the article on procrastination because it has a lot of helpful hints I’ve leaned on over the years.
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That’s it for this week! These newsletters are coming once a week, every Friday with updates on Dev CheatSheets development and some useful code snippets. Share it with your friends!