Fizbuz
Professional profile for developers
After getting inspired by dynamically generated social sharing images that I've seen on IndieHackers, I decided to roll-up my sleeves ship this feature for Fizbuz. Here's a quick recap of what I had to build:
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I created a screenshot API that accepts a URL and uses chrome-aws-lambda & puppeteer to capture a screenshot and store it in S3.
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I created a special webpage to render a tl;dr version of a user's Fizbuz profile. This is the webpage that the screenshot API will request. Here's an example: https://fizbuz.com/u/carter/share
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When a Fizbuz user updates their profile, I invoke the /screenshot API:
await fetch(`/screenshot/${user.nickname}/share`)
- When someone shares a Fizbuz profile URL on a social platform, there are meta tags in the header that point at the preview image that was stored in S3:
<meta property="og:image" content="${imageUrl}" />
<meta name="twitter:image" content="${imageUrl}" />
That's it! ✨
TGIF! 🎉
It was dangerous, but we decided to deploy to production on Friday because we just had to add support for the DEV profile links. Enjoy and have an awesome weekend!
Fizbuz encourages developers get beyond simply checking boxes (Ruby, Rails, etc) and helps them provide more context about the tools that they use to code.
For each tool that a developer has experience using, they are able to set a skill level value (0 - 10 inclusive). Fizbuz used to have a numerical slider that allowed users to set the value. But we got consistent feedback from users that they didn't know what the values meant.
After gathering feedback, we replaced the slider with a clearer set of mastery milestones that provide more clarity about what each skill level value means.
0 = Just Started Learning
1 = Hello World
2 = Completed Tutorial
3 = Personal Hacks
4 = Limited Use in Production
5 = Understand Best Practices and Pitfalls
6 = Used in Large Production App
7 = Multiple Projects and Use Cases
8 = Super User
9 = Core Contributor
10 = Creator
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This looks fantastic! I'm trying to learn coding in several languages and I'm definitely struggling with learning things like best practices.
I'll have to check it out!
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Although I can say right from the start, I'm not a fan of the fact there is no way to sign in except through github. I don't have a github account and don't really want to take the time to make one right now. I'll try to remember to later but no promises.
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I recently launched the v1 of Fizbuz and I thought I'd take a moment to share with folks the timeline of my journey:
- Jan 2018 - started working on Fizbuz full-time
- Jan - May 2018 - customer development & prototyping
- May 2018 - interviewed at YC, didn't get in
- July 2018 - paused Fizbuz to work on an income-generating project
- Jan 2019 - re-started Fizbuz, threw away prototype
- May 2019 - shipped a public v1
There's still so much more to do (finding a co-founder, product enhancements, marketing) but I was excited to share this milestone with all the folks here 😊
2 Comments
Awesome feature. I really like dynamic previews. Do you measure impact of this feature on traffic acquired from social media platforms?
Not yet. Honestly, a lot of my product roadmap includes best practices that I'm observing or learning about on other SaaS products.