End of Cycle 1 - Retrospective

I can conclude that Cycle 1 is finished.

The main focus of Cycle 1 was “Building a welcoming place,” and I think I managed to achieve it. The bar was not that high anyway.

Here is what I managed to implement:

• Added RSS feed for blog
• Added meta-tags with OG images
• Transformed all images to WEBP format where possible (it seems that OG images do not support WEBP)
• Fixed accessibility page speed report
• Added feature to subscribe when launch with ConvertKit
• Add automatic Sitemap generation

Learnings

This time passed very quickly. That might be because the total amount of time I invested was around 4 hours for programming and 3-4 hours of writing.

I spent most of the programming time trying to implement integration tests for an article on the blog and ensure that the OG properties are correctly displayed. The chunk spent there was trying to make Rails load Sitepress from a path under test/data/sitepress and then get a blog article from there instead of testing against a real article.

Learning: Speed of development should be considered in a side project, and sometimes it is ok not to stub a resource and instead assert against the actual resource.

Learning Limited time allocation helps with decisions about when to stop working on a solution and go back to rethink the approach.

What’s next?

There are two directions where I could spend my time:

1. Expand the currently proposed courses and write the proposed list of emails/chapters I plan to tackle for each of them.
2. Implement a prototype for writing and sending an email to users.

I am confident I can find a solution for 2, so maybe I should focus on the content part because people might be buying the course because of the content and not the platform.

Thus, I want to do a cycle focusing on the content and trying to expand it a bit more.