Frontend Mentor February 2022 review

Hello! I hope you had a good month throughout February. It feels odd writing a regular monthly update with everything that’s going on in Ukraine at the moment. I’ve been struggling to stay focused, and I really hope all our community members in Ukraine and anyone else who’s affected are staying safe.

We saw 18,538 new community members join the platform, and over 6,000 people join our Slack community, which is fantastic. I want to say a big “welcome” to all our new community members! 👋

This month’s update will be shorter than usual, so I’ll dive into what we’ve been up to and what we’ve got planned for this month.

Features & Updates

This past month

• Added the work preferences form — This is the first step towards releasing the Hiring Platform, so it feels great to have this on the site. If you’re signed in, you’ll notice a new briefcase icon in the header. Clicking that will take you to the work preferences form. This form is where you can set your work preferences and availability, ready for when we launch the Hiring Platform. I’ve recorded an introduction video where I talk more about the form, the Hiring Platform and answer a couple of questions you might have. I’ve also written up a guide to help give more context on the fields and help you complete it. We’ve still got lots of work to do before we launch the Hiring Platform, but by filling in your details now, you’ll be ready for when it goes live, and companies start searching for available developers. If you haven’t heard about the Hiring Platform yet, here’s an article that dives into what we’re planning.
• Continued building the Hiring Platform — Josh has been making good progress with the front-end of the Hiring Platform. Now that we’ve released the work preferences form, Mike will move over and focus on the back-end and help Josh out on the front-end as well. So everything should start moving faster, which is exciting! This will be our primary focus from now until launch.

This coming month

• Continue building the Hiring Platform — As I mentioned above, this will be the main focus until we launch the Hiring Platform. We’re aiming to get it live in the Spring, but I’ll provide more updates as we get further along with the build. I’ve had many extremely interesting and valuable calls with recruiters, hiring managers, CTOs, and founders. I believe that what we’ve got planned for our first version will be a fantastic offering!
• Implement tactics to reduce spam comments — We’ve got a few minor tweaks we’ll make beyond working on the Hiring Platform, which I feel could lead to significant improvements on the platform. Last month especially, we experienced a considerable rise in the number of spammy, copy/pasted comments on the platform, which don’t aim to answer any questions solution authors might have. Our goal with Frontend Mentor is to create a supportive, enjoyable community where people are happy helping each other providing valuable feedback wherever possible. Therefore, we will make a few tweaks, including additional helper text for the solution feedback form and the “Questions for the community” field on the solution submission form. These will help people consider more specific questions to ask when submitting solutions and provide some guidance for people looking to give feedback. We’re also going to add confirmation modals on short comments and when people try to mark short comments as helpful to ensure comments are specific and valuable to the solution author. Another thing I need to do is write up some clear community guidelines to clarify expectations and outline our goals for the community we’re trying to grow.

Wall of Fame

Mentors of the Month

Congratulations to Naveen Gumaste for finishing in the top spot on the Wall of Fame for January! A big congratulations to Deniel Den and Rio Cantre for finishing 2nd and 3rd, respectively. You’ve all got lovely shiny new Mentor of the Month badges on your profiles!

Zero To Mastery were also extremely kind and offered to sponsor the February Mentor of the Month awards. So, not only have you all earned badges, but you’ve also all won a free one-month subscription to the ZTM Academy! I’ll email each of you separately with your discount codes.

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.

Airdrop Raffle winner

Congratulations to Mayur Mali for winning our monthly Airdrop Raffle! Enjoy using your free premium challenge credit to take on one of our premium challenges!

Each week and month, we randomly pick some to win a design credit (weekly) or a premium challenge credit (monthly). Every week or month you finish on the Wall of Fame, you’ll be in with a chance of winning! 🎉

Feedback and ideas welcome

If you’ve got any feedback or ideas for Frontend Mentor, please 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! 🙂