Frontend Mentor August 2022 review
Hello! I hope you’ve had a great time throughout August! We’ve had a productive month improving and cleaning up the code bases. It’s also been our best month for all the key metrics we track on the learning platform, including sign-ups, challenges started, submitted solutions, and posted comments! 🎉
As usual, I’ll start this review by welcoming our new community members! We had 25,601 (🥳!) new members register on the platform, and nearly 10,000 joined our Slack community. I hope you all love being part of the Frontend Mentor community!
Things have been a little slower than we would like on the hiring platform. With the wider economic slowdown and many companies implementing hiring freezes, it’s not been the best time to launch a recruiting platform. However, we’re well aware that this is a long game, and we’ll continue to push to get more companies on board and iterate the platform to keep adding value.
If you read last month’s update, you’ll know we are in a period of refactoring, refining, and improving our code bases before we add anything new. Ensuring there’s time to take a step back and rework areas that need attention is always important. Otherwise, if you keep adding new features and code without ever going back and reviewing what you’ve got, it’s easy to build up lots of technical debt, which can cause big problems down the line. So it’s been great to find areas to improve and make the necessary changes!
Features & Updates
This past month
- Improved the UX around updating and deleting solutions — We updated the solution page to add a menu in the top right corner to make it easier to delete and edit submitted solutions. During this update, we actually (unwittingly) made it impossible to remove unsubmitted solutions, as we removed the “Delete solution” button from the solution submission form. Sorry about that! We’ll be making a change this month to make it possible to remove unsubmitted solutions again, but in a more intuitive way than the old button on the submission form.
- Increased test coverage — We’ve added a range of tests across our code bases to increase confidence when pushing new updates. Our test coverage on the API side is good, but we’re looking to add more on the front-end, which is what we’ve been focusing on.
- Removed more V1 API endpoints — In our bid to make the site more efficient, we’ve moved more pages away from our old V1 API endpoints to our V2 endpoints. The V2 endpoints enable us to leverage Redux more on the front-end and ensure we’re not making unnecessary API calls or adding duplicate data to the store. Unfortunately, updating the comments led to a bit of a rabbit hole, which took up more development time than anticipated. So we didn’t make as many updates as we would have liked on this goal.
- Updated pages to use our Storybook design system — Pretty much all our pages are now using the Storybook design system we’ve got, which is great. There’s a small amount of work still to be done, but this will make our front-end code bases for the learning and hiring platforms more consistent as they both pull from the same design system.
This coming month
Development work throughout September is going to be extremely broad, so I’ve decided not to add any specifics this month. We’ll be doing lots of small updates, like optimising how we’re using Cloudinary for image hosting, bug fixing, a few UI tweaks, moving more V1 endpoints over to V2, along with many other small tasks. In next month’s review, I’ll add more details about the tweaks and fixes that were made. But I won’t dive in for now, as there are so many small tickets on our Delivery board.
Wall of Fame
Mentors of the Month
Congratulations to Lucas for finishing in the top spot on the Wall of Fame for August! Lucas absolutely smashed the previous monthly high score and is now in the top spot of the all-time Wall of Fame on Frontend Mentor. Well done, Lucas! 🥳
Also, a big congratulations to PhoenixDev22 and David for finishing 2nd and 3rd, respectively. Both had massive scores for the month, helping many people with their solutions.
Not only have you all got lovely shiny new Mentor of the Month badges on your profiles, but you have also all won a one-month free subscription to Zero to Mastery!
Thanks a lot to Zero to Mastery for sponsoring August’s Wall of Fame! 🙌
As always, a big thanks to everyone who gave feedback and support to other community members throughout the past month. Giving code reviews is not only a great help to other people and a brilliant way to meet other community members, but it’s also incredible for your own learning.
Reading other people’s code, analysing it, and giving constructive feedback will really help boost your skills and reinforce your knowledge. Giving code reviews is a crucial part of being a professional developer, so reviewing other people’s solutions is a perfect place to practise giving helpful feedback to others!
Also, with the Hiring Platform now live, it’s also worth noting that the code reviews you give to others on the platform will play a big part in where you appear on the developer search results. Your code reviews for other people will be an incredible way to display your knowledge. This will help hiring managers get a detailed insight into you as a developer by reviewing your solutions and reading your code reviews.
Airdrop Raffle winner
Congratulations to Yacine Kahlerras for winning our monthly Airdrop Raffle! Enjoy using your free premium challenge credit to take on one of our premium challenges!
Each week and month, we randomly pick someone to win a design credit (weekly) or a premium challenge credit (monthly). Every week or month you finish on the Wall of Fame, you’ll be in with a chance of winning! 🎉
Feedback and ideas welcome
Please let me know if you’ve any feedback or ideas for Frontend Mentor. I love hearing how you’re using the platform. The best place to message me would be to DM in the Slack community.
I hope you enjoy the month ahead! 🙂
