I decided to create this blog about the creation of the blog today, this way I could experience actual “blogging” instead of website building.
I’m not sure what I want this blog to be, I really don’t want this to be another leetcode solutions blog, but it’s on that path since that’s what my friends request and those posts seem to get traffic (maybe I’m just better at promoting them and haven’t tried enough with others?). Ideally, I’d like to be creating cool stuff, giving the advice (that I wish I’d gotten) to early career software engineers, and helping people learn fundamentals that I see lacking so often (even in myself sometimes- I still have to review that one binary search article from time to time and have trouble with certain problems that should bee simple by now). I’d love to review STEM toys like osmo and little bits to see which ones are the best and help people educate their kids too.
Eventually, I’d even like to track my journey through learning copywriting (unrelated to programming, but I want to learn about marketing - maybe it wouldn’t fit here?) or learning datascience.
I’m kind of regretting naming this blog fizzbuzzed. Google asks, “Did you mean fizzbuzz?” when i type it in. I’m going to have to find a way around that or rename this. What could be a better name, CodeMinion?
I came up with a plan for the blog today:
Acquire people:
1. Doing interviews:
- leetcode, comments on other interviewing blogs and fb groups with interview solutions, systems design info you can't find elsewhere.
2. Learning to code:
- "Writing my first app" and posting on sites where ppl are trying to learn to code apps or thinking about it.
- "intro guide to recursion - 0 to grok' - recursion seems to be the most often missing fundamental.
- learning data science ( i go through data science coursera and make interesting visualizations to post to r/dataisbeautiful which is somehow one of top subs)
3. Exploring careers or thinking about CS:
- interview with a pm,
- interview with a security engineer
- interview with an SET
- interview with an SRE
- interview with an iOS engineer
4. Parents of kids that are good at code or want to learn:
- "how to teach your kid coding"
- "why coding is the best skill to give your child"
5. Early in their software career:
- CS websites, remarket to leetcoders
Then, sell:
1. Systems design interview course (self made)
2. Learn to code courses (affiliate don't want to build but have to find good ones)
3. Kid STEM toys (Affiliate but have to identify good ones)
4. Products for new engineers (clean code, design pattern books, ergonomics, credit card offers)
I’m thinking of using a public trello board and the trello api or firebase RTDB to let users who come to the site see or vote on what the articles should be.
I experienced my first instance of using Google analytics to improve my site yesterday. I noticed people coming from leetcode to the 3sum solutions post were bouncing almost all the time. I changed the link to link to an anchor at the correct solution instead of the top of the article and the bounce rate was down and the session time up (people started reading the page).
Maybe if I arrange the solutions with a ‘table of contents’ and add some ‘hints’ they will be much more useful to readers?Similar to how I complain about not being able to jump to the correct piece of most youtube videos readers probably want to jump around my article to only the parts they are interested in.
Got macbook pro. No physical escape key is…irksome. Site looks terrible on it (especially front page, everything else is mediocre. Need redesign, if I make the redesign similar to how I see the site ending up and putting collections of links rather than full posts I can get an idea of what people that come to the site want by tracking what gets clicked on the most (the ‘behavior flow’ graph in Google Analytics seems very useful but I’m not sure I fully understand it yet (100% of inflow isn’t accounted for with outflow for example).
I want to add fresh links to engineering design blogs. Making a solution with RSS reader.
Heard about treating posts and people in a social graph as terminals in an electric circuit, could try to add that idea if I can get people recommending stuff.
Got my first like on twitter as fizzbuzzed. Followed bloggers in a similar space and they were asked a question. Answered with a link to my article and got a like.
Does there exist a blog command center? Features I’d like:
Find comments in real time on popular sites that are relevant to your blog. (Twitter posts, quora questions, blogs)
Annotate google analytics graphs with social media posts and blog post times. (see my analytics with times of my posts and twitter, pinterest posts annotated on them).
Suggest keywords that have good traffic and are related to your blog but aren’t being covered. (some kind of keyword planner integration)
Pinboard of ideas (pinterest and google keep kinda style or integration).
Trello integration of todo list (some kind of integration with trello or the lke where I can track my todos).
Maybe my blog command center is just my computer and phone.
Beautiful site inspiration: - Growthlab - interviewing.io - Medium - https://edabit.com/guide
“Fizzbuzzed is a place for learning about CS and tech careers”
Have tags right at the start (1 icon for each of the top level): - Tech Interviewing - Preparation Guide - Systems design interview tips - Top 10 Interview Solutions - Why you failed your tech interview
- CS Fundamentals
- Learn Recursion
- Guide to CS Resources
- Learn Monetization
- How much do SWEs make?
- 0 to monetized app
- Analytics tips
- Learn about Tech Careers
- Interview with a ___ series
- Book Recommendations and Reviews
- Blog
- Just a full listing of recent posts
Other ideas: - Re-energize solutions with table of contents. - Use Semantic UI - Add a challenge that needs to be solved with programming but not on site (type password to get next challenge kind of deal.)
I wanted to make a video for the upcoming leetcode solution post. I didn’t want to hand code anymore animation since it’s very time consuming.
I tried to find a program to do animation with. I tried Adobe Animate and Tumult Hype 3. Alignment ended up being a big issue in both programs. I need to do a lot more learning before it becomes efficient.
Ended up using Keynote to create a slide show with some animations and the intention to create a screencap to create a video.
The keynote animation is so far satisfactory but still difficult/impossible to get the effects I’d like.
Issues with alignment during design in Animate (this is likely do to me needing to learn a lot of stuff). I’d still prefer to use animate over hype now because I had a pretty good looking animation in hype but ended up abandoning it because the output came out misaligned despite showing everything aligned when running the animation in the program itself.