Richard Feldman has spent years using and teaching Elm and wouldn't want to use anything else at this point. Learn about why he likes it so much and how you can learn from him and his new book, Elm in Action.

Rtfeldman on Twitter

Elm in Action

Aditya Siram (Deech)

CoffeeScript

Haskell

GHCJS

React

PureScript

Elm

David Nolen

ClojureScript

Om

42: Jake Lingwall - Author and Software Engineer

Tereza's chart library

Elm Visualization

Edward Tufte

elm-lang.org/community

Beginner Elm workshop

Advanced Elm workshop

Richard Feldman on YouTube

Dave and Jamison host the Soft Skills Engineering podcast. Jamison talks about how he got into coding, and they talk about how they met and why they started the podcast, as well as the Dunning–Kruger effect, and React Rally.

Soft Skills Engineering

Jamison Dance on Twitter

Jamison's website

Dave Smith on Twitter

The Manager's Path (book)

Performance Appraisal And Human Development (book)

The Effective Executive (book)

Dunning–Kruger effect

V School

React Rally

Jens shares what accessibility is, why it's important for everyone, and how it can increase your business revenue.

• JAWS Screen Reader
• Lighthouse in Chrome DevTools
• axe: the Accessibility Engine from Deque
• ELIA
• Menu Concepts
• Accessibility on MDN
• WAI-ARIA

Footnotes

1. There actually is some caption access in movie theaters

Cassidy is really into mechanical keybards. She talks about how she got into keyboards, some keyboard vocabulary, and the Scrabble keycaps she launched on Massdrop.

• Cassidy Williams on Twitter
• cassidoo.co/
• Venmo
• Massdrop
• Mechanical keyboard subreddit
• WASD keyboards
• Sentraq
• Clueboard

Keyboard sizes

• 100%
• TKL - tenkeyless - 75-80%
• 66-68% - takes off the function row
• 60% - takes off arrow keys
• 40% - takes off number row
• 30%
• Orthogonal - keys are in a straight grid
• Ergodox
• Iris

Switches

• Membrane Keyboard
• Butterfly switches
• Clicky switches
• Tactile switches
• Linear switches
• Clear switches
• Cherry brand switches
• Box Navy switches
• Zealio switches

Keycap Profile

• DSA keycaps
• SA keycaps
• DCS keycaps by Signature Plastic
• GMK - made by a german company in the same shape as DCS
• XDA - similiar to DSA with a wider face for legends

Legends

• Dye sublimated

• Double-shot molding

• DSA Borealis - glow in the dark legends

• Blank keycaps

• Homing keys

• ABS plastic - can get shiny over time

• PBT plastic

• Artisan keycaps

• Tiny - artisan keycap maker

• Grab bags

• Layers

• Cases

• Preonic - can play music

Jason talks about his experience teaching SQL at a dev bootcamp and why he does it.

• BookBytes Podcast
• DevMountain
• Jeremy Robertso
• MongoDB
• SQL
• Chinook
• Reuven Lerner
• The Freelancers Show
• meetup.com
• RailsBridge
• Girl Develop It
• Scratch
• Jason on Twitter

Safia and I talk about how she got into computers, her startup, how she uses pen and paper for productivity, and a recent event where she received a lot of hate online.

• BookBytes Podcast
• Neopets
• Productivity blog post
• Uni-ball Onyx Fine tip red pen
• Safia on Twitter
• Safia's site
• Safia's blog

It's common to hear jokes about PHP being a terrible programming language, but it powers most of the web. I talked with Sammy Powers, host of PHP Roundtable, to see what we can learn from languages like PHP>

• PHP Round Table
• phpsadness.com
• Zeev Suraski

Takeaways

• Don't jump on the language bashing bandwagon. No language is perfect, and we can all learn things from other languages.

Kent C. Dodds has accomplished a lot in a short amount of time in his career.

• Kent's Website
• Kent on Twitter
• Kent on Github
• Kent's videos on Egghead
• Zero to 60 in Software Development: How to Jumpstart Your Career - Forward 4 Web Summit
• Why Hiring is So Hard in Tech by Eric Elliott
• BucketSteams Demo Video
• The Changelog Episode 200

Takeaways

• Teaching is one the way you solidify your understanding and find the gaps in your knowledge that you need to fill in. You can read a book, and you can even build something, but you don't have a solid grasp on it until you've taught it to somebody else.

• As soon as you've learned something new, you probably know something that lots of people don't know yet. You're not too inexperienced to teach something.

• How do you know what to build? Think of things you want to exist.

• When you get stuck, work on it for about 20 minutes. Then try to make a reproducible example separate from your app. You may found out that the problem isn't what you thought it was. If you can reproduce it in a small example, it should now be easier to debug. If you still can't figure it out, go to StackOverflow, or to the community somewhere online and share your reproducible example with somebody. If you ask your question well enough, you'll usually get a good response.

• Meetups are constantly looking for speakers, so it's pretty easy to get a speaking spot at a meetup.

• You can ask a meetup organizer if you can speak even for just 5 minutes or 20 minutes. It doesn't have to be a whole hour.

You don't have a ton of time to devote to your side project. You can use this side project checklist to learn how to actually launch a product from start to finish.

The Side Project Marketing Checklist

I've always had an entrepreneurial bent. I've always had one or two side projects. I've found that my biggest challenge as a developer was making a plan and sticking to it in marketing.

I would typically build a product and then try to reverse engineer the audience and find people who would appreciate it as much as I did. So, I would post it to a few websites and see that no one cares about it as much as I do. And then I would lose hope, give up, and move on to the next side project. A lot of them are sitting around on Github these days.

I realized that I was missing consistency and a long-term plan. I was looking at these projects like they were going to get magically picked up by the tech press and I would skyrocket to fame. But when you only have a few hours a week to devote to a side project, to make it work, you have to work on it consistently over a long period of time.

Consistency over time is what is going to make these side projects eventually go somewhere.

I read a lot online and one of the sites I really like is Indie Hackers, where a lot of programmers talk about side projects that they actually make money from.

Half of the problem is making people aware that it exists and making it stand out from the crowd.

I put the first version of this list together a few weeks ago. I posted it on Github and posted it on a few sites. A lot of people liked it. It really took off and was trending on Hacker News and was featured on several blogs and websites. It's really cool to see your work appreciated by people all across the world.

Checklists

I make a checklist for everything. That started a few years ago when I read a book called The Checklist Manifesto. He talked about how hospitals use checklists to make sure all the proper steps are taken before surgeries. And the hospitals that start doing this have their error rates go way down.

With software, I think about how to lower the error rate. At the end of the week, when we do our deployments, there's a checklist. When new team members come one, there's a checklist. When I'm hiring, there's a checklist.

A checklist felt very natural for doing side project marketing because I don't have a ton of time to devote to marketing for my side project.

Use a Checklist Before Automating

A lot of times non-technical people come to me at work with an idea for improving the platform. I usually tell them, before we build it, can you do it manually? Can you build a checklist and do it manually, and test it out before we spend engineering time on it?

It's organized into these sections: before you launch a product, as you launch, right after you launch, optimization, and recurring tasks. As you use the checklist, you're going to want to customize the list and move things around a bit.

One of the things in the prelaunch section is to look for competitors. And then another thing is customer research. You might want to start reaching out to potential customers on LinkedIn. As you go through the list, it's going to give you different ideas for all the different phases of your product.

If you're product is similar to other products, you want to know about them. The easiest way to know how to market your product is to look at somebody who's already doing it successfully, and use them as a template.

Research Before You Start Building

A lot of developers start building something that scratches their own itch and then try to market it. And they don't know if it's useful to anyone else. That can work, but a better way is to start with market research and talk to customers before you start writing code.

Writing code takes time, so if you can put off writing code and hedge your bets by knowing what's going to work and what won't, it can save a ton of time.

Customer Research

This is where you talk directly to the customer. See what they really want and what they're paying for when they go to your competitors. Those people you talk to are also your possible early beta users.

Landing Page

A lot of us developers think that the product sells itself, and that's a pretty naive way to think about it. The truth is that most people will come to your landing page, leave, and never try your product.

Blogging

Many developers are hesitant to set up a blog, because it's just setting up more work for you to do later. You're going to need to update it regularly to get the most value out of it.

The list has a lot of tips about blogging platforms and search engine optimization.

Email Marketing

It's really just in the last few months that I've learned the power of having an email list. Social media is great, but you don't really own your audience like you do with email. I may have a 1,000 followers on Facebook. That's great, but what happens when their algorithm decides to favor companies that pay money to have their posts show up in people's newsfeed?

Email is really compelling because once people opt-in, that's a direct connection that no one else can cut off. Email is much more powerful than trying to build up a social media audience. When you have a group of people that have told you that they're interested in your project that's a big asset.

There's a blog post about email marketing tools.

You don't have to create all the content for your email list.

People who sign up for your list are interested in certain topics. So you can include once article that you write and then link to 5 or 6 articles from other sites on the same topics.

Social Media

knowem.com is a site that lets you search for the availability of usernames on various social media sites. That can save you a lot of time. But you may be able to just use your personal accounts.

Don't try to post on every social media site.

You don't want to make yourself post on every social media site every week because you're not going to stick with that. It's also really hard to find actual customers on social media. It's more of a long-term branding strategy and you may not get much value out of it for side projects.

Post-launch

Once you launch, you want to start reaching out to the world.

Customer Outreach

The people you reached out to during customer research are the best people to reach out to at this point and let them know that you've launched a product. And you can reward them with a coupon code to reward them for helping you out.

Free Promotional Channels

There is a huge list of places to post your startup. It will take some time to post to these sites and directories, but you can take a few minutes a day to post to a few of them.

Paid Promotional Channels

Once you've gotten a bit further and you have some paying customers, you may want to experiment with online ads.

Recurring tasks

Once you've done a few things on this list, come up with a list of things that you can do every week, potentially forever, to continue to market your product. Don't just work through the checklist and then hit the bottom and think that you're done forever. It's not that simple. You need to do some stuff consistently for months or years.

Song of the week

Concrete Jungle (Acoustic) by Au/Ra

I talked with Jake about being an author and software engineer. He shares his journey of becoming an author and getting selected to have his first book published through the Kindle Scout program. And he talks about his new book, Vagrants.

• Freelancer
• Vagrants

@climagic is a twitter account all about the command line. Mark talks about why he started the account, some interesting things he's done with it, why CLI is so great, why you should learn it, some history of the command line, and some useful commands.

• climagic on Twitter
• climagic on YouTube
• climagic website

Once you understand the language, you're not limited or constricted by what another person's vision is for what you can do with your computer. Your terminal window becomes a portal into the heart of your system that lets you do what you want.

Mark Krenz