Jiruto

I utilized some of the core features in our community platform to give birth to a new little idea. Live video sessions on any topic.

Our users can create or find video chat rooms on any topic they wish to discuss. It's a place for brainstorming and finding people to brainstorm with from around the world.

I had a fun idea to help learners find learning resources efficiently. The goal is to bring us closer to good resources and save time. Save time searching and save time wasted on inferior resources.

It started with a little post and I created a demo engine on our website. Hopefully, it will help some people frustrated with skimming through google.

After talking with community managers and months in the building, I launch our beta for community manager.

I packed into Jiruto all the professional tools needed to run a successful community and I'm opening the beta for about 15 communities.

We prioritize knowledge-oriented communities and educators and wish to help them grow and increase member engagement.

It's been fun and hard work, and a lot of learning. I wasn't a programmer when I started this project and I think I can say I'm a pretty decent one right now.

Never thought I'd be my first employer as a programmer.

Right now I need to learn so many more things, such as marketing and online campaigns, customer support and more.

Will update soon about how it goes.

I started to have quite a few things I wished to update our users about: Code changes, meetups, webinars, guides about learning, and more. The need for a blog became clear.

So I've set up a blog, I used Ghost as the CMS (I recommend) and published our first post explaining what was missing for me in e-learning, what were my pains, and why Jiruto started as a result.

Post: What is missing in e-learning?

If our visitors wish to go over the list of content items without any other interaction, they don't need to signup. Accessing the learning paths their resources can be done without registering. However, there are quite a few benefits to signing up.

Seeing the first users that decided to be more active and sign up was exciting. Someone decided to invest more time and effort into a product I built. People decided that there is enough reason for them to do so.

Continued to develop and build on top of the prototype. Some things changed but the skeleton remained the same.

During that time, I had to learn new things such as dev-ops and working with GCP and I used my current learning needs to implement a better solution.

I asked myself: if the website was ready now, how would I use it? So I designed the website that would've helped me build itself.

The very first pseudo-working version of the product. It just conveyed the general idea and I used it as a prop for showing people what I'm talking about. It's much better than verbally explaining.

From here on it was easier for me to think ahead. It served as a saving point for my main ideas and allowed me to think of more in a more narrowed context.

After developing the idea further I wanted to start putting it into practice and explore how it would look and feel.

I am not a web developer and I didn't know html, css and js. I did have some experience with Swift.

At first, I thought about bringing in a web developer, however, COVID-19 regulations that were starting to kick in were really limiting my options for meeting new people that might be interested.

I decided to do it myself and started learning web development. From the day I decided to do it. It took me nearly a month to learn the stack including VueJS and Golang.

It's a spin-off of another idea I worked on before. I learn everything myself online and before each and every new topic I had to do long research to find the best learning resources.

I found out that there were several criteria that I looked for when searching. I wanted something that promised to cover everything I needed and delivered. I needed resources vouched for by the community. Updated with the latest information. Ordered so I know where to go next, and most importantly, that won't waste my time.

That's how Jiruto started. A community that curates learning resources, vouches for them, and puts them into learning paths.