gitconnected
A developer community and tools to support career growth
👉 For those affected by layoffs or looking for their first job during a difficult economy, I’ve made my coding interview course free for 2023 => https://skilled.dev
This is my knowledge compiled over hundreds of hours both preparing for interviews as well as being the interviewer hiring candidates.
- It provides the core Data structures & Algorithms knowledge
- Teaches you how to think through interviews so you can confidently solve any problem
- It enabled me to receive a job offer from Google after 1 year of experience without a CS degree.
I want to help as many people find jobs as possible.
There are no limits on the number of free redemptions, so please share with anyone that would find it helpful or use it as much as needed yourself.
Platform - https://skilled.dev
We've been building out a lot of free resources for developers to help them learn to code and also grow their career. We're now finally launching our first paid resource which is a platform to teach software engineers how to pass the coding interview and stand out in the job hunt.
The course is ~25% but is a ton of content to get started. We're doing a free early launch to gather feedback to ensure the learning outcomes are being taught as effectively as possible.
Everyone hates updating a Word doc when they need to share their CV. Building and maintaining a resume is incredibly painful, but it's a requirement for any job. Since we have a target audience of software engineers, we can create a product tailored to generating a high-quality resume focused on our industry. So far the results are early, but there has been a lot of positive feedback, and this feature is something we plan to invest in heavily to become the go-to site for developers to create their resume.
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Amazing tool. How do you monetize? I see you are making $500/month already
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I see you're in a similar area, very cool! Great name/domain btw. If you're interested, once I launch my premium content, I would love to chat about advertising or affiliate opportunities with you.
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Thanks! At the moment, the monetization is coming through affiliate links on the blog (https://levelup.gitconnected.com). We have quite a bit of traffic there, and now I'm trying to build more features to funnel them to. The career tools will always be free, but I plan to launch some premium career-related courses.
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The growth for the publication has been incredible, and it's been my main focus over the past ~2 years, consuming probably 80% of my time spent on gitconnected. It was the perfect project to grow a community and create a path for developers to find the rest of our tools.
https://levelup.gitconnected.com
Things I learned:
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Content is the path for sustainable SEO. Write articles that solve peoples' problems.
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Creating a platform for sharing content from the community allowed us to make huge gains in traffic. I can review and publish many more articles in the time it would take me to write one myself.
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Write about what you know.
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If you are sharing the content of others, value the relationships you are building with them. Most people write because they are passionate and put hours into each article.
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Content is a numbers-game. The more content you have and the more frequently you post, the better the results. It's a very straightforward path.
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View content as an investment, not the end goal.
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Monetizing content is difficult, especially if you don't own the infrastructure.
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You can galvanize a community around education and personal growth.
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Content is a great avenue if you are working part time. You can find those 1-hour chunks in the mornings, nights, weekends to create articles or find new contributors.
We really wanted to focus on automating the painful aspects of career growth for developers. Having a portfolio website is a requirement to find a job, especially for new software engineers. It can be incredibly painful to keep this up-to-date. We launched an API to dynamically populate the content of their websites so they can update it without needing to make code changes or re-deploy the site.
I had been working part-time for a couple years while I was iterating on the idea, looking for product-market fit, and building the community. Some life events combined with the continued growth made it the perfect time to take the leap.
My mistake: Trying to solve too many problems and have the product be too many things. I really honed in on what the problem is that I'm solving and saw a clear path forward. We also created an advantage with the community we built that will now let us move much more quickly and gain feedback, allowing us to create a product that developers will find value in.
What I learned:
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Don't go full-time until you understand your unfair advantage that you will have in the market you are entering.
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Make sure you fully understand the problem you want to solve before going full-time. You should be entirely clear on the pain point you are trying to remove.
We launched Level Up Coding (https://levelup.gitconnected.com), a programming publication on Medium. Content was always planned to be an core part of the platform, and we saw an opportunity to leverage Medium's growth and network build the blog. While there are many risks associated with building your business on someone else's infrastructure, doing this allowed us to grow much faster and without spending any money on acquisition.
Originally I created the web app as a side project. After close to 2 years working as a developer, I realized the problems I originally intended to solve still existed. I took my first version and re-launched it as a production application and began building the community. https://gitconnected.com
As a self-taught developer, I had many struggles trying to start my career as a software engineer. I wanted to help others in the same position and form a community around starting and building their careers as developers. I bought the domain and began hacking it out as a side project to put on my portfolio. My goal was to have a centralized location to find coding tutorials, share news, and connect with other devs.
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