New to the monthly recap? This is a monthly business-in-review post that'll cover the following:

Health of the business
Course updates
Bug fixes + features
Monthly Goals

🗓 July 2021 Goals In Review

My main goal for June was to:

Finish the free-version of the CSS masterclass / course ✅

And that was it! Although only one bullet point exists, this one bullet point accounted for days worth of work—taking me the majority of the month to complete.

Learning CSS on the web is something you can find on any other learning platform—YouTube, LinkedIn Learning, Treehouse, etc.—but one thing I felt all these courses lacked, was an approach to modern CSS methodology while actually putting what you learn to use in real-world project. It's quite surprising how many courses will "teach you CSS," when all they do is go over the theory—don't think I'll be building a full website anytime soon understanding what display: block is without actually knowing how to create a block class and insert it into an index.html file.

Anyways, the CSS masterclass I released is just about five hours worth of content spread across nineteen different videos and three code challenges currently. Everything there will teach you how to follow a professional web development process, taking what you see from a well-thought-out design on Figma, to a fully mobile-responsive webpage that you can view on both your phone and desktop. It's reveals the exact process I use when I develop websites professionally for clients, charging upwards to $130 / hr. So hopefully my knowledge can translate over to you, and help push you in the right direction to obtain similar results.

I'm very proud of how the course has turned out so far and have about 3 - 5 more hours of premium content for it on the way. In the end, I'd give myself a B+ rating this month, since I really worked hard to hammer out those five hours worth of carefully edited content.

💰 Business Review

Coming soon...

⏯ Course Updates

For the month of July, there were a total of 19 new lessons released, and three new code challenges, all related to CSS.

I understand that most subscribers probably already have some CSS knowledge, but I highly encourage anyone who comes across the course to check it out—it contains some highly useful tips and tricks that'll make your CSS development much more enjoyable compared to commonly taught, old-school methodologies.

For upcoming courses, I have a big store of creative development to unload. August's lessons, some which have already been released, contain more knowledge on how to create a data-driven Three.js globe in outer space, and will also feature the basics behind creating a side scroller JavaScript game you can launch and share with your friends.

Will also be posting some entertainment videos on YouTube to help get people excited for some of the upcoming lessons. So get hype, because there's some great stuff coming.

🐛 Bug Fixes + Features

More Inline Editors

Spent a good chunk of time refactoring the previous text editors so that they were inline rather than contained inside a modal. The improved user experience here was too good to pass up since I was started to get annoyed myself when I'd have to edit one of my comments in a place completely separate from where it would actually be rendered.

Additional Guards to Game Course Purchase

Even with an update to the game course purchasing system, I still had one user message me saying they purchased the course, but it wasn't associated with their account by default. How frustrating this is, both for the user, and for me since I provided a process that didn't function 100% as expected. Absolutely did not want this happening for a third time, so I added one more guard to the backend code which says, if no email is present in the call, end the call right then and there, and present the user with an error message, no matter if they are logged in or not.

Code Challenge Improvements

Code editor extends further to give more space for coding / viewing results
Better mobile responsive view for mobile users
Creation of code-challenges on the fly (I can now edit as needed for optimal user-experience and learning)

Forum Improvements

Added ability to edit forum post title (not available prior)
More text styling options within the wysiwyg

Course Page Improvements

Changed out the progress ring around courses with a pure SVG implementation. The previous one used a library that loaded async with JavaScript, creating for a weird flash of content as user progress was loaded and rendered onto the page. This no longer happens with the SVG implementation.

🏆 July Monthly Goals

More videos, more site improvements, that's the goal. Simple enough right? Well here are the specifics:

Site edits

Add tooltips to wysiwyg options so user knows what each button does @1:30pm Tue Aug 17
Make wysiwyg tooltip bar sticky so it follows you on long texts @3:30pm Tue Aug 17

Course Production

Record audio for side scroller video

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