mydevportfol.io

This was nice because it came as a direct request from somebody struggling with the product via livechat.

I was able to jump in over lunchtime, and push a new feature live that let the customer solve the problem.

The issue? He had logged in, then created some more repositories in Github, and they weren't displaying in mydevportfol.io.

The solution, a button that can "refresh" the data from Github and re-populate the users's repositories.

Nice that I was able to push it out so quick, and the user bought a portfolio later that day, so that's awesome :)

They kept sending me emails, warning that the impending 13th September deadline for SCA compliance is looming ever closer by the day.

So, finally I relented and spent a sunday afternoon figuring it out.

It took me a while to even remember what my current setup was, did I just use their elements? Or was it just fully using their API??

Turns out, mixture of both. It was tricky to get done but finally migrated over by the end of the day, thankfully the Stripe docs are still as strong as ever. :)

One thing that I didn't expect, however, was that I'd need to manually switch my API in the dashboard, I'm used to upgrading API versions by changing the number in a URL, not manually pressing a button in a dashboard, which I thought was a bit weird.

But, tis done now, and I took the opportunity to clean some copy up while I was there, and some housecleaning re old sloppy code. :)

Glad it's out of the way, and now I'm familiar with how it's done so I can implement it quicker in my other projects :)

A significant milestone that I've been putting off for quite a while - but till now mydevportfol.io was sending the user's data to my server, which was rendering the website, and sending it back. This was often very slow (never did find out why though).

Now though, I've offloaded the actual generation of the user's portfolios to the frontend. No more unnecessary backend calls. Performance is noticeably better!

Clip of the app being so fast that the images being downloaded is now the slowest part...
https://www.instagram.com/p/BujTmXcCY_v/

This is THE most frequent objection I hear from users - that they don't have their work on Github or it's set to private.

It's not like I didn't know this - all the projects I want to show off are private. This is one of those features I put off in the interest of moving fast, but finally circled back to it.

Also updated some colour schemes while I was there - buttons are now a lot more attractive and move away from the standard Bootstrap buttons look.

https://mydevportfol.io

Last night over dinner I watched a Steve Schoger video of refactoring UI on YouTube (yes I'm that sad).

it gave me some great tidbits to fix about mydevportfol.io - namely the form inputs. The new styling is much better!

Check out the before and after in the tweet: https://twitter.com/cderm/status/1090727933197672450

the video for anyone interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6-q5BheEYU&t=2s

For a while it's been obvious that I needed to add user accounts and persist data. Given that the app is effectively a website builder, it makes sense that people would need to log in, leave, come back and pick up where they left off. My app couldn't support that. Until now.

Some firebase magic and we now have a better login/sign up flow and I can persist data to a database.

The next step is to take a look at the sites people are building, figure out what the stumbling block is for them that they didn't finish it, and reach out and try help.

:)

I think I'm shutting down mydevportfol.io. It's been a fun side project and made some beer money, but I'm not sure it's a viable business. Also, after over a year working on it, I think I'm just a little burnt out on it right now.

So, as part of sunsetting it, I'm wrapping up a few designs I have in the pipeline for it, and turning it into a donation-based revenue model, so people can pay as little or as much as they want.

It's been fun, and I might pick it back up, but for now it won't get much of my attention...