Early last year, I launched a nutrition site called Is It Keto. From November 2018 until March 2019, the site was my full-time focus. Every month, visitors increased by 50% to 150%, an exhilarating growth rate that far outpaced any of my previous projects.

There was only one pesky detail standing between me and tremendous profits: money. For every dollar I spent on the site, I earned back ten cents. For my non-business-savvy readers, a -90% return on investment is considered less-than-stellar. At the end of March, the site’s financial future seemed bleak, so I shelved the project.

An insider’s story about Facebook in the years leading up to its IPO. It’s surprisingly candid — it names names and exposes internal Facebook discussions that were never meant to be public.

An engaging read, but the narrator is painfully obnoxious.

Highlights

• Is It Keto’s revenue doubled to $82.44 with zero effort on my part.
• My task journaling app is almost ready for publication.
• I’ve begun setting up meetings with potential customers about my next project ideas.

Goal grades

At the start of the month, I gave up on Is It Keto and set goals to help me pursue other projects. Here’s how I did against those goals.

Learn Vue.js

• Result: Went through the Vue guide and used Vue to implement a basic site.
• Grade: A

I’m not fluent in Vue, but I’m “conversational.” I can create a website with the features that I want without getting tripped up by the language itself, which is more than I could say about Angular after 6 months banging my head against the wall trying to use it.

Okay, I know you’re skeptical. Other guides have promised you painless web app tests only to reveal that their solution requires some hyper-specific tech stack or a paid third-party service. I won’t do that to you.

This guide provides a straightforward and flexible template for end-to-end tests that you can apply to almost any web app. The only requirement is that your app can run in Docker.

That’s really the only requirement! You can test a Ruby app, a React app, an Enterprise Java Beans app, or even some wacky web stack you invented. And it doesn’t matter if you’re developing on Windows, Linux, or Mac. Best of all, you don’t have to perform convoluted configuration or install any software beyond Docker.

Overview

This past weekend, PyTexas invited me to speak at their annual conference in Austin, Texas.

It was a fun trip, and I learned a lot. It was also expensive, both financially and in terms of time. I’m taking these notes partly to share what I learned and partly to help me decide whether the benefits I get from attending conferences outweigh the costs.

Favorite Talks

Intentional Deployment: Best Practices for Feature Flag Management

Speaker: Caitlin Rubin from Optimizely