I use these posts as part of my effort to build in public. They showcase my current progress on products and audience building. They are intended to provide an imperfect snapshot of what I am working on and progress towards goals. If nothing else, they are useful to me for record keeping.
Overview
Last week was a relatively mellow week in terms of productivity on the side projects. I made the conscious choice to not work over the weekend too so I could recharge a bit. I am really glad I opted for the time off.
Irons in the Fire This Week
- Developing new "Postcards" music newsletter
- Mapbox and React Deep Dives series
- Mapbox Developers Handbook
Metrics
Making just about everything transparent and accessible.
- You can check out the Growth Dashboard I mentioned below
Here are the things I worked on during the last week.
Personal Site Improvements
The What
I continued making some small stylistic tweaks to the site (mostly typography related). The main improvements I made centered around internal tooling. I expanded my existing utility scripts for generating a new blog post to support multiple different templates now that I have a few recurring weekly posts (i.e. What I Built Last Week, Songs of the Week, Mapbox and React Deep Dives).
The Why
I have been trying to automate as many things as I can. I have fairly limited free time (1 to 2 hours a day) to devote to side projects, so the less time I have to spend on repeatable, non-value add tasks the better. Expanding my blog post generation utility script to support different templates has already saved me a good amount of time. I will probably write a post on how I did this, but it loosely follows the process I used to develop a utility script for auto-generating React Components.
Writing
The What
I put out three blog posts last week:
- A Complete Guide to Sources and Layers in React and Mapbox GL JS
- What I Built Last Week - February 15, 2021
- Songs of the Week - February 22, 2021
The guide to sources and layers was a beast and a wake up call on just how involved some of these remaining Mapbox and React Deep Dive guides are going to be. Initially I had hoped to put two to three of these posts out a week, but realistically it will probably be limited to one.
I have been having fun with the What I Built This Week and Songs of the Week series though. There is something freeing about the formats as I do not have to worry about suggesting a "correct" solution to a problem, I just get to write.
That's it for the updates this week!
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