Monthly Wrap-Up – June 2020
Thanks for checking out my monthly blog series. Every month, I highlight new topics that I’ve explored, projects that I’ve completed and helpful resources that I’ve used along the way. I’ll also talk about pitfalls, including diversions, wrong turns and struggles. By sharing my experiences, I hope to inspire and help you on your path to become a better human, in whichever field that may be.
Greetings! Today marks the first day of COVID-19 Phase 4 here in Bermuda. Soon the airport will re-open and all hell will surely break loose, but for now, the island is enjoying a beautiful early summer, blissfully protected from the rest of the world by hundreds of miles of ocean.
June was fun. Different, but fun. Full of new experiences.
First, I want to dive into where I’m at with Guess My Pay. Then I’ll highlight some of the courses and resources I’ve been using to review JavaScript and learn React. Finally, I will wrap up this post with a couple of my favorite events that I attended in June.
Let’s get into it.
The first few weeks after launching Guess My Pay, I felt low. Like I got all the air kicked out of me. We had invested (what felt like) so much time in the idea and to have released it all into the wild — I imagine it was very much like sending a child off to school. I was left wondering what I was supposed to do with myself.
This feeling didn’t last long. James (my co-developer) and I quickly re-grouped, focusing in on our next steps, which included website updates and enabling social sharing within the app. A new roadmap before us, I found myself once again highly motivated to continue building Guess My Pay.
One thing I like to do is engineer motivation into my environment, whether it’s by signing up for events or surrounding myself with inspiring people/tech. Last month, I added a new source of motivation: Y Combinator’s Startup School.
The program has three main elements:
- A self-paced curriculum comprised of videos and articles, organized by topic
- Weekly updates to track user metrics and milestones – both completed and target
- Weekly group calls with other founder teams to practice your pitch and exchange feedback
One thing I quickly learned is the Y Combinator credo: “write code and talk to users”. The importance of getting feedback is drilled into founders in almost every video. It’s not optional, it’s mandatory.
It’s also not something I had been doing regularly while co-developing the Guess My Pay MVP.
Eager to remedy this mistake, I drafted a list of questions to guide user interviews and started emailing family and friends for 15 minutes of their time.
It’s amazing what you can learn in 15 minutes.
YC Startup School has made me realize that I was overlooking the human side of building and marketing new products. It’s so easy to think about your code rather than the actual problem, busying yourself in features rather than on feedback.
If 2 weeks of Startup School has shifted my perspective so dramatically, I can’t wait to see where I’m at in another month!
As far as Guess My Pay, our June 2020 highlights include:
- New About page on the website: The who, what and why, plus an extensive Getting Started infographic with step-by-step instructions.
- Video Walkthrough: How to install and use the Guess My Pay Chrome extension.
- Social Sharing: A share button has been added to enable you to share a custom graphic inviting your colleagues to guess your pay (screenshot below). Check out James’ blog post if you’re interested in the technical details of how we set up social sharing.
Hindsight is, well, you know what they say. Knowing what we know now, there are a handful of things we would have sorted out pre-launch. Did the lack of detailed instructions dissuade people from downloading? Maybe. Did the lack of easy social sharing functionality hinder our growth? Probably.
The most important thing I’ve realized is that dwelling on missed opportunities or on “Launch” in general is counter-productive. If you’re not embarrassed by your MVP, you waited too long to release it. And, per Y Combinator advice, launch, launch and launch again. Don’t aggrandize launch!
On the learning front, I am deep, deep in the black hole that is front-end development.
Why the shift away from data science and machine learning? At first, I couldn’t explain my change of heart. But the truth is that the experience of building Guess My Pay left me with an urge to review JavaScript fundamentals rather than join Kaggle competitions. It gave me reason to flex my design chops and dive into the newest version of Photoshop.
For over a year, I’ve been trying very hard to focus on Python and data science. I was worried that highlighting my diverse interests and front-end portfolio would make me seem distracted or lacking focus.
I’ve been trying to hide the fact that I am a jack-of-all-trades for fear of being dismissed as a master-of-none.
And it’s dawned on me that this was stupid. At my core, I am a generalist. I work with Photoshop on one monitor and a code editor on the other. Need a logo? I can do that. Need copywriting? Hold my wine.
All that being said, my goal at the moment is to explore any and all opportunities that enable me to apply and develop the skills that are currently most exciting. In June, this meant refreshing my JS knowledge and starting to learn React (loving it so far).
If you’re on the same train, you might enjoy a few of my favorite resources:
ES6: The Right Parts by Kyle Simpson – A paid course, available on Pluralsight and on Frontend Masters. Need a refresher on ES6? This is the course for you.
Javascript30 by Wes Bos – A free course in a larger library of free/premium courses. Wes is an excellent teacher. I particularly enjoy the style of this course because it allows you to build up a portfolio of functional mini-projects.
The Net Ninja YouTube Playlists – Particularly Complete React Tutorial (with Redux) and React, Redux & Firebase App Tutorial. Follow along with these videos if you want to learn React by building stuff.
Finally, I attend two interesting events in June.
The first was a panel discussion hosted by Women In AI (WAI) – San Francisco and Cadran Cowansage from Elpha. Titled “Careers in AI and Engineering”, the event showcased a handful of inspiring ladies who spoke about their experiences in the tech industry. I found it very interesting to compare and contrast each of their day-to-day work lives.
The second event was another panel discussion, this one hosted by Correlation One, featuring a group of engineers from Twitch. A reoccurring theme of this talk was the emphasis on data science at scale and the importance of building a supportive user community. I love Twitch. #fangirl
(By the way, if you’re interested in upcoming events, check out the Elpha website and Correlation One Facebook page.)
Finally, I released four new dotnotes! Please download and enjoy:
With that, June is a wrap! Thanks again for reading and, until next time, happy coding.
