Software Engineering Boss

I've decided to close down this project due to how hard it was to develop serverless functions with AWS. Either AWS Amplify isn't ready or I just don't know enough about it. Either way, I'm shutting this project down for the time being while I focus on finishing the recording/update of Master VS Code.

The frontend is live at https://www.softwareengineeringboss.com/

You can purchase my course to help you greatly improve your Developer Experience (DX) to the point of flow.

There are two things necessary for flow:

1. Enough knowledge to meet your challenge
2. Immediate feedback

I'll give you both.

All the functionality of the app is done! This is a major milestone. Everything from now on is a refinement of the code-base and the UI.

A few days from now, I will bring the frontend live and software engineers will be able to buy my first course: Master VS Code.

These were two intense months. I will probably take one or two days off to rest, celebrate and think about the next steps.

After the initial phase of my Master Plan is complete, I might turn this platform into a SaaS.

Note: The frontend is now offline because I had to redeploy the frontend's CD/CI infrastructure due to a bug with AWS Amplify's CLI. I will bring it back online when the UI refinements are done.

Today I got a "hello world" version of my website live.

The website has nothing to show for it, but this is an important milestone because it means most of the infrastructure and important decisions regarding the frontend have been made.

Notes regarding the website:

• SSL/HTTPS support
• Made with Gatsby
• Using AWS's CloudFront CDN
• Continuous Delivery/Continuous Integration pipeline

Made a few key decisions regarding user auth:

• I will offer email/password login using SRP
• I will offer social login with Apple, Google, and Facebook
• I will not offer phone login
• I will offer optional MFA with Authenticator App and SMS.

Master Plan
Daily Progress

I was looking around for a platform to sell my courses on. After looking at many of those platforms and being unhappy with their revenue model, I decided to build my own.

This has a few advantages:

• It's an opportunity for me to learn enterprise-level software engineering
• Is proof of skill
• This can later turn into a SaaS

Today I've got my first paying customer for the Master VS Code course 😁 🎉

I've built 'Master VS Code' because all the flexibility VS Code offers - which makes it great - also presents a difficult challenge: how to best configure it for productivity. At the moment, VS Code has more than 700 settings (I talk about most of them on my YouTube channel), thousands of extensions, automations, integrations, snippets, and many other tools that could make or break the developer experience. So in 'Master VS Code', I focus on web development (HTML, CSS, JS, TS, React, Node, etc) and provide software engineers with a curated list of settings, extensions, integrations, linting, debugging, and best practices to automate much of the work and help them become much more productive.

Today I've finished the landing page for the Master VS Code course. When I started I had no idea how to build an effective landing page. I've read a few more books about marketing, sales, and negotiation:

• Expert Secrets by Russell Brunson
• Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook by Gary Vaynerchuk
• Permission Marketing by Seth Godin
• SPIN Selling by Neil Rackham

Special highlight for the SPIN Selling book, it was amazing.

But what really turned the tide was watching the Video Sales Letter course by Clayton Makepeace. This course was fantastic 👌

Let me know what you think about my landing page!

I've finished the outline for the things I want to talk about regarding VS Code and I've started recording it.

I'm pretty sure the outline and subsequent re-recordings will happen many times in the future, but I'm ok with that - it's part of the process of creating a great course. I also intend to keep this course up-to-date so I expect to re-record or add some sections to the course in the future.

Being a computer science tutor for college students for many years, I know one of the best ways to learn something is to teach it.

So I've decided to build my own online courses around the things I want to be really good at in web development:

• VS Code
• HTML
• CSS
• JS
• TS
• React
• Node/Deno