John Ciprian’s Post

I'm excited to share a new tool I've been working on: the Dot Voting Calculator! This tool helps you quickly and easily calculate the results of a dot voting session. Dot voting is a simple and effective way to gather feedback and make decisions. It's a great tool for Agile teams, but it can also be used by any team or organization. The Dot Voting Calculator is easy to use. Enter the number of dots voted for each option, and the calculator will automatically calculate the results. I hope you find the Dot Voting Calculator helpful! Please let me know if you have any questions. Here are some of the benefits of using the Dot Voting Calculator: 🔹It's quick and easy to use. 🔹It helps to ensure that everyone's vote is counted. 🔹It can be used to make decisions in a timely manner. If you want to improve your team's decision-making, I encourage you to try the Dot Voting Calculator! https://lnkd.in/eY4pVRTQ? #dotvoting #agile #decisionmaking For everyone who reads to the end 😀 I never created a WordPress plugin until now, and I am not a good text writer, but with AI, so much more is possible. I used Gemini to explain how to write a plugin, help me create CSS, generate the text on the page, find sources to refer to learn more about dot voting, and even review my code and come up with improvements. All this in four hours. This final paragraph I wrote myself (Still using Grammarly to fix the error)

Here’s an unconventional productivity tip: Stop trying to read everything. You will never be able to do it, and you will forever stay guilty. Instead, figure out what you need to read to grow as a developer. There are tons of RSS readers available which can be super customized. And if you don’t want to take those pains, start using DevBytes. It is like an RSS reader (there are labels/filters to customize content). What stands out though is the way they show content. Everything is summarized into a paragraph or so, and serves the needs just right. DevBytes Try now : https://2ly.link/209wA

Great talk on the pitfalls of Markdown and the docs-as-code approach in product documentation at #lavacon by Scott Abel. I wrote this article about 5 years ago and, while the implementation was a success at the time, I learned a lot about what NOT to do. For example, our software needed more single-source and reuse capabilities than what Markdown could offer. It was "free" (not including the internal costs of development), but required a lot of work to maintain. I wouldn't recommend trying it with multiple, similar releases or a robust branching strategy. For that, I'd say DITA, XML, or even a simple all-in-one tool that allowed you to quickly reuse content. #lavacon2024 https://lnkd.in/g2pAZDDT

Here’s an unconventional productivity tip: Stop trying to read everything. You will never be able to do it, and you will forever stay guilty. Instead, figure out what you need to read to grow as a developer. There are tons of RSS readers available which can be super customized. And if you don’t want to take those pains, start using DevBytes. It is like an RSS reader (there are labels/filters to customize content). What stands out though is the way they show content. Download Link : https://lnkd.in/gpG8-mps

I'm a fan of Eric Ries and The Learn Start-Up Method. As a non-technical founder, I've designed a few MVPs in the last year and this is what has worked for me: →Build it in a weekend – How can you strip down your MVP so much that you could realistically build it over a weekend? →Use off-the-shelf tech – Tools like Google Forms, text messaging, and email can be quickly adapted to your MVP’s needs. Don’t overthink the tech—use what’s readily available! →Manual effort is okay – MVPs don’t have to be automated. A customer might see a semi-polished result, even if you’re manually piecing it together behind the scenes. →Mix of users – Get a diverse mix of users, ideally some you know and some you don’t. Go for people who will give honest, constructive feedback. →Consider a paid MVP – I’ve tested both free and paid MVPs. If you start with free, test willingness to pay as soon as possible. Don’t get hung up on the exact dollar amount—focus on building momentum and refining from there. What other approaches have worked well for you in building MVPs?

We made it to the front page of Hacker News and got on the GitHub trending page with an unpolished feature last month. If we hadn’t gone through Y Combinator, that wouldn’t have happened. I say that for a few reasons. Launching early and often is challenging for anyone. You can’t be a perfectionist. You have to be willing to take criticism and respond kindly and respectfully. Individual and group office hours at YC were great training wheels for learning how to get out of your own way and just put the thing out into the world already. You need real humans using your product before it can approach a polished state that people both use and enjoy using. YC provided a great space for getting early users, but it also provided amazing guidance on identifying, finding, and speaking with your ICP. As a marketing automation company, it wasn’t immediately obvious that we should be launching on dev-centric forums. You can know these things as a founder and unintentionally avoid them if you aren’t forced to do them through daily and weekly external accountability. Engaging at regular intervals with driven and extremely intelligent founders for 3 months helped us push ourselves to form a habit out of putting out new releases and talking to users. Lastly, it can be tricky to blend tone and content in a way that lands well in developer-heavy forums, and marketing to devs isn’t intuitive, especially when your product isn’t a pure dev tool. Having immediate access to HN mods and launchHN advice taught us a ton about how to successfully release new products to developers. Our latest release introduces big improvements to our low-code email template editor. And we’ll continue making it even better as long as we’re talking to users and releasing regularly. https://lnkd.in/gZD9cJkY

In 2021, I was part of a team whose product failed terribly in the market. It takes so much courage to write about this because, for over two years, I didn’t heal from the product failure. I took our shutdown from the market personally even though it was no fault of mine. However, it was a product that I had given my best shot in terms of content marketing efforts. Many product failures are associated with 'unscalability.' It was the same with our school management software. In reality, it wasn't fit to be in the market because the codebase was problematic, with tons of bugs here and there. Our departure from the market happened when clients needed the software the most. Schools needed to upload their pupils/students' results and there were multiple errors the developers could not fix. It was a nightmare 😔 But that is what happens with unscalable software. >> They cost money. >> Frustrate team effort. >> Could lead to the shutdown of a product. Every product needs to be built to accommodate future updates that reflect market trends. Bi-monthly, I host Room 1010 on Code Space For our final session in April, Nyah M. will be sharing insight on "The Cost of Unscalable Software." it's going to be a pretty interesting and enlightening session. Share this with your friends in tech 🫡 See you in the Room! Date: Friday, April 26th, 2024 Time: 8 PM WAT Venue: https://lnkd.in/dcGsG5_S ____________________________________________ I'm Isabella, a Content Strategist and my goal is to ensure that the 'boss' of your business knows your brand by heart and is loyal to it. Are you a B2C or SaaS tech brand? Send me a DM if you are looking to build authority that transforms your brand into a household name.

We've written up some more details on our recent webhooks functionality, along with a sample Zapier implementation in our latest post! https://lnkd.in/e3r7Yqzp #webhooks #edtech #onlinecourses

Learn why DevEx belongs in the C-Suite! https://lnkd.in/gtPi-yeu With the rapid growth of new Software technologies, engineers are inundated with complex tasks beyond coding, such as security and operations, leading to cognitive overload. A focus on DevEx can alleviate this by streamlining workflows, reducing context switching, and automating redundant tasks. This not only enhances developer well-being but also drives efficiency, innovation, and retention, ultimately affecting the bottom line. Given the changing macroeconomic landscape and growing competition in the tech space, are you exploring ways to adopt or scale your DevEx strategy? Happy to share how I am working with fortune 500 companies align engineering efforts with company-wide objectives to help bolster their DevEx practices. Feel free to DM me! #devex #innovation #developerproductivity #collaborationmatters

I’m an early adopter and LOVE trying out new tools. Here are some of the tools that I use to save me hours of manual work a day. 1. Clay - for sales: As a technical founder and a CEO, I spend most of my time doing sales and marketing. I’m doing a lot of manual outreach to prospects and I used to spend hours a day trying to find the right companies that could use something like Traceloop. Clay changed my life. It allows me to build lists of leads, enrich them, research their website, and craft personalized messages. 2. Smartlead - I then feed those leads into SmartLead, which helps warm up my e-mails (so that I don’t land in the spam folder), and automatically classify the responses I get (she’s not interested, he’s the wrong person to approach, etc.). This is where I truly feel how LLMs change the way we work. 3. Positional - for content marketing: It’s a great tool for researching and generating content ideas for our blog. People read our content, sign up, and then we use another AI tool, June, to understand who they are and what they are doing on our platform. 4. Warp and Cursor - for when I have an urge to write code: Warp is a bash terminal enriched with GPT done right. It understands how I use the terminal; and it knows the right command to suggest based on context and previous commands I ran. And can help me craft cryptic calls to kubectl or the AWS CLI. I won’t be able to go back to iTerm after that. Cursor has all the hype lately - and it’s well justified. I switched to it from VSCode / GitHub copilot a month ago and - wow. It’s a combination of great UX + smart use of LLMs that makes a huge difference. If you haven’t tried it yet - do it now. What are your tools of the trade? I’m always looking for more recs!