Frontend Mentor November 2021 review

Hello! I hope you had a great month throughout November. Going into last month, I was excited, as we planned to announce our hiring platform plans to the broader public. It was awesome to see my article about “A better way to discover junior front-end developers” get a good response. I’ll talk more about our plans for the hiring platform below, but it felt great to publish that article!

In November, we welcomed 16,553 new members to our platform and over 6,000 into our Slack community. If you’ve joined in the past month, welcome to the Frontend Mentor community! ??

Let’s dive into what we were working on in November and what we’ve got planned for December…

Features &?Updates

This past?month

• Added hiring platform landing page — You’ll notice on the website that we’ve added a “Hire Developers” link in the header navigation. This links to our hiring platform landing page for companies looking to hire developers from within the Frontend Mentor community. It’s fantastic to have the landing page up and start building our waitlist of companies interested in using the upcoming Frontend Mentor Hiring platform to discover front-end developers to hire. I’ve already had some brilliant conversations with company owners and CTOs who have joined the waitlist to hear more about their hiring needs. I can’t tell you how excited I am to launch the hiring platform and help connect great companies with our incredible community of developers!
• Launched tags — Our major feature release this month was the addition of tags to the platform. This means you can now tag your solutions with relevant tools, techniques, and topics to help add context to your solutions. So, for example, if you used React and Styled Components on a project, you can now tag it with the “react” and “styled-components” tags. There are a couple of benefits to this. The first is that anyone following either of those tags will see your solution in their home feed. This means more people will see your submission, hopefully leading to a higher chance of getting valuable feedback from others in the community. Second, the tags you add to your solutions will help you show up in different developer searches when we launch the hiring platform. For example, if a hiring manager searches for a developer in our community who has some experience with React, if you’ve submitted several projects using React that are also tagged with the “react” tag, you’ll be positioned higher in the developer search results. The hiring platform is due to launch in Q1 2022, so it’s not ready yet. But it makes sense to add relevant tags to your solutions now so that you’re prepared for when it launches.

This coming?month

• Continue with hiring platform planning — I’ve been doing lots of planning and interviews around the hiring platform to refine my ideas for the first version. I’ve had some highly insightful conversations and am confident we have a solid first version in mind. The next step will be for Mike and me to sit down and plan out the logistics of the project and the technical aspects.?
• Start the hiring platform build — Once we’ve laid out our plans for the new platform, we can start building! ?? The hiring platform will be our primary focus from now until launch. We’ll make minor tweaks to the main site as and when we need, but the goal will be to get the hiring platform launched to start helping our community find new jobs!?

Mentor of the?Month

A huge congratulations to our three Mentors of the Month for November! They all gave loads of incredible feedback to other community members. Congrats to Raymart Pamplona , MikevPeeren , and Alex for finishing first, second, and third respectively. There’s a lot to be learned by reading other people’s feedback and tips, so I’d strongly recommend giving each of them a follow!

As always, a big thanks to everyone who gave feedback and support to other community members throughout the past month. Giving code reviews is not only a great help to other people and a brilliant way to meet other community members, but it’s also incredible for your own learning.

Reading other people’s code, analysing it, and giving constructive feedback will really help boost your skills and reinforce your knowledge. Giving code reviews is a crucial part of being a professional developer, so reviewing other people’s solutions is a perfect place to practise giving helpful feedback to others!

With the hiring platform on the horizon, it’s also worth noting that the code reviews you give to others on the platform will play a big part in where you appear on the developer search results. Your code reviews for other people will be an incredible way to display your knowledge. This will help hiring managers get a detailed insight into you as a developer by reviewing your solutions and reading your code reviews. As I mentioned earlier, the hiring platform isn’t due to launch until Q1 2022, but it’s worth starting to give others code reviews to build up your skills and get ahead of the game ??

Feedback and ideas?welcome

If you’ve got any feedback or ideas for Frontend Mentor, please do let me know. I love hearing how you’re using the platform. The best place to message me would be to DM in the Slack community.

I hope you have a great month ahead! ??