Dev Tips
A developer tip, as a gif, in your inbox each week
I created Dev Tips because I prefer to learn in public. Having to make a concise animation for a developer workflow forces you to think about the benefits of what you're showing and how it works.
We got the chance to talk to Indie Hackers about our road so far. It’s been a long journey with a lot of ups and downs, but we’re proud of how far we’ve come. Check out the interview to learn more about how we got started and what challenges we’ve faced.
It's always helpful to collect feedback from your users. In my case, if someone Tweeted something positive about my newsletter, I'd save it on a dedicated page on my website.
To date, I've collected over 400 pieces of feedback from kind folk who said something nice: https://umaar.com/dev-tips/feedback
At this point I had published 200 tips which was a massive achievement for me. If you do the maths, you'll notice that it's not exactly a once a week thing, which I believe is fine.
While consistency is important, for me, quality is even more so. What this means is, if I didn't have something useful enough to share, I wouldn't send out an email to the mailing list, instead I'd wait weeks until I had something worth sending out.
A lot of the "tips" I share are around Google's Chrome DevTools, so Google were happy to sponsor 10 of my emails which helped with motivation for this mailing list.
Google returned to sponsor the newsletter a bit later for a few more emails which was helpful.
I built it from scratch, a simple PHP website with a Mailchimp signup form. I had actually been posting such "tips" to Google+ in 2014, but I knew I wanted to be in control of my own content.
I originally called it "Dev Tips Daily" where I ambitiously thought I could post a tip every day. Eventually I turned this into weekly.