Week 40 progress

Hello there!

It's time for our weekly status update. Let's go!

Progress

This week, I've made great progress on Volume 3.

I've finally finished the section about application integration by covering SOAP Web services, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), and Enterprise Service Bus (ESB).

It was fun going down memory lane to write about SOAP. Many believe that it's completely outdated and irrelevant, but I disagree. SOAP still has valid use cases, and shouldn't be ignored entirely. That's why I wanted to at least cover the topic in Dev Concepts.

With that done, I've actually completed the chapter about Software Architecture, which ended up being HUGE. I'm proud of myself today! 💪💪💪

Time to celebrate! 🎉🎉

I've also published one more article extracted from the first volume: https://dsebastien.net/blog/2021-08-18-what-is-a-software-crafter. This one is important. It shares my vision about why one should approach software development as a craft. I wanted to share another one, but I instead decided to work on an essay about the future of work as part of the Medium Writers Challenge: https://dsebastien.medium.com/going-back-to-work-no-thank-you-5429d60acd12

Marketing & Sales

This week I decided to bite the bullet and hire Claire, a professional copywriter who's behind https://copyisland.com, and who is also (https://www.indiehackers.com/Haikuka)[part of the IndieHackers community].

She reached out to me via Twitter after having seen one of my posts on IH. The timing was just perfect. I've been hesitating for a while about hiring someone, as I couldn't find enough energy to move forward efficiently on that front. I think that I was going in the right direction with my efforts, but now I'm taking a shortcut, trading money for time.

With the help of Claire, I should finally be able to do a better job at explaining which problems Dev Concepts solves, and improve the CTR & conversion rates.

Of course, it's an important budget (> 500€), but it should be worth it in the long run. It just shows how much I believe in this project...

Numbers

So far, I've spent ~390 hours working on Dev Concepts.

This past week, there were ~35 visitors on the landing page.

No new sales this week.

What's next

Next week, I'll dive into the chapter about Information and Data architecture. It's the last big chapter for this volume.

Writing this next chapter is going to be tough because there's a LOT to cover: relational & non-relational data stores, data modeling, data models, normalization, data storage, data integration (e.g., ETL, CDC, etc), data governance, big data, linked data, data analytics, and more!

Have a great week!

About Sébastien