Hello everyone 🥰
I hope you are all well and had great last two weeks.
For me they were extremely busy with our hackathon event and all the subevents like keynotes, workshops and a panel discussion around them.
I got some serious hosting experience under my belt now. I also feel more comfortable doing the hosting now 🥰 Talking is easy but hosting an event is a different beast because you have to take care of so much stuff at once.
Hackathon Experience and Learnings
The hackathon we try to host quarterly is something special and important. We actually can see how our users try to use the product, get a ton of feedback and see where our product still lacks.
Also we get to host some events with speakers from the community and the topics are not specific to our product and thus helpful for the community 🦄
Learnings:
- Hosting events is easier with someone managing the chat and taking care of things you might have missed in the heat of the moment
- Panel discussions live from differing points of view and also respect among the panelists. Make sure to select your speakers for this
- Send possible questions for the panel discussion to the speakers beforehand
- Make sure to include the audience if an interesting and related question arises in chat
- Doing a workshop: Write down every step and everything you want to link to and keep it handy. Do not let anything happen by chance!
- Having docs to refer to is essential. I noticed that my work on the docs came in handy. I can not count the times I said "And you can also read everything here in detail!" 😊
More Docs Work - API docs
Our API docs are not up to the task when it comes to helping our users achieve things. One even mentioned that they look Unfinished (Yikes!).
So I looked up some nice API docs and one stood out: https://plaid.com/docs/api/products/assets/#asset_reportcreate
I also love the nginx docs for their simplicity: One pager with at least one example for each directive!
So I set out to recreate a one-pager in Docusaurus where you can search with your browser search. I actually hate when getting the details of a command requires to open a new tab.
With the new version of our product our API docs will have a one pager with all the API commands and you can get into the details on the exact same page 🥰
Speeding up Our Website
Last but not least our website needed more love. By accident I found out that 36% of our website visitors come from mobile and the landing page was not pretty there 🥶
With some tinkering it looked ok but the performance on slower mobile networks was awful: 3-4 seconds until first paint!
Turned out fixing this is easy: The hero-image that is above the fold should be converted to a smaller version -> SVG 1.8mb => png 27kb.
Also eager and not lazy-loading it speeds up. Do this for everything above the fold!
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