Status Update - 2023-02

Status Update - 2023-02

This is a regular series reporting on how things are going at Console. This post looks at what happened in January and February.

Focus for January

In Jan I wrote:

We had the whole team in the office this week (we normally work a remote/hybrid model) to run through the product screen by screen, so the next few months will be focused on product tweaks that came out of those discussions. We'll also be onboarding new hiring partners.

So how did we do?

Design improvements

Following the discussions in the office, we released a full set of design revamps for Jobs Console. These are detailed in the changelog post last month.

Focus for Q1 2023

After finishing the Jobs Console UI improvements, we've moved back to the core Console product and website. We've kicked off a major project to bring our reviews to the web so they can be shared, linked to by tool developers, and improve discovery through search.

We originally built the Console website using Hugo deployed to Cloudflare Workers Pages, which has worked well using Google Sheets as a backend for 2+ years. However, Hugo has some limitations around building dynamic pages from remote content provided through an API. This is limiting our ability to have individual pages for each tool review.

So after doing some prototyping work with NextJS and the new app directory architecture pulling content from the Notion API, we're working on a site migration. This will take some time, and we're going to push out changes incrementally, but this is our focus for the next few months.

In the meantime, we've started recording season 4 of the Console Devtools Podcast which I'm co-hosting with Jean Yang from Akita who is doing a great job helping with the interviews! Expect more news on that in April.