{23} Live Training, Cheat Sheets & Sponsor Ninja
Featuring Gergely Orosz, freeCodeCamp.org, Rohan Paul, Vincent Will, and Mohammed Furqan
Design: Live Training
Gergely Orosz
This is a problem with enterprise SaaS. Growing startups want to be that all-in-one solution, requiring a tangled rat’s nest of functionality. Live training is the bandaid solution because it’s hard to provide a good user experience as the product grows in complexity.
Companies should focus on making the core use case as obvious as possible. The onboarding experience should be about getting from A to B without being distracted by a side quest. Once users have that foundation, introduce them to a plugin marketplace to tack on value add features.
Frontend: Centering Things
freeCodeCamp.org
Centering things in CSS used to be complicated. You used to have to use unintuitive margin or position hacks. I still occasionally use a position+transform hack if I’m doing something uncommon. I use flexbox to center things 95% of the time.
/* parent */
display: flex;
align-items: center;
justify-content: center;
Even if you do use flexbox, I’d recommend reading that article. It’s useful to know other techniques. When you encounter that code in the wild, you’ll know what is going on.
Backend: Cheat Sheets
Rohan Paul
It has been a while since I've written SQL. I’ve worked primarily with NoSQL solutions and key/value stores more recently. In the future, I’d love to explore vector databases.
Even if I’m not writing SQL today, it’s likely I’ll need revisit that skillset at some point. These cheat sheets are so valuable. Five minutes of reading through a well designed cheat sheet can save hours of Googling.
I’d love to have access to cheat sheets for every technology I’ve ever used or plan to use. Thinking about this makes me want to design a book of cheat sheets. Imagine a 300 page book covering 150 technologies. Every technology gets 2 pages so you can lay the book flat and see everything.
Marketing: Sponsor Ninja
Vincent Will
Self-serve sponsorship opportunities are very interesting to me. I’d much rather pay $5-10 for a low-friction sponsorship that has the potential to drive brand awareness and dozens of clicks over the lifetime of the ad than investing $5 in a single click through PPC.
As I build the next iteration of Subset, I plan to create a resource hub for self-serve sponsorship options. Apps that integrate Sponsor Ninja will be a nice starting point. I even have a domain for the project. (sponsified.com 😎)
Team: Managers of One
Mohammed Furqan
My wife is reading Rework currently. I’ve always been inspired by the the 37signals crew, Jason Fried in particular. They are pioneers of doing more with less. Hiring managers of one is a perfect example. You don’t need a crazy hierarchy of people owning other people’s time if you can find and inspire people to be autonomous contributors.