The Websites, They are Shiny

September 26, 2019

Welcome to season 2 of Getting Apps Done!!!!!

Kel and Joshua have both updated their personal websites recently, so today they take a look at each other’s sites and discuss the reasons they keep them up to date as well as the reasons behind a lot of the individual decisions they made!

This kicks off the first in a series of episodes aimed at helping developers market themselves better, whether you’re looking for a job or leads for your freelance business.

A special thank you to all our listeners who’ve supported us, given feedback and participated in the show!

Be sure to check out our new Slack community to meet others who are facing the same things you are and share your journeys!

• 00:00 Joshua

  Hey folks, welcome to Getting App's Done. A mostly non-technical podcast about building software. I am Joshua.

• 00:12 Kel

  And I'm Kel.

• 00:14 Joshua

  And today we are going to talk about personal websites. Uh, we mention our websites at the end of every single episode, so I'm sure every single one of you has looked at them. I'm sure you have...

• 00:27 Kel

  I like that silence from the audience there that can't actually respond, but is probably what they would have responded anyway.

• 00:33 Joshua

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, we've told you about them enough, but recently we have both actually gone through and redone them and we talk a lot about how important personal websites are and portfolios, things like that for getting a job. And while we are in a slightly different position, I thought it'd be really fun to talk about why we've redone our websites and why we made the strange and weird choices that we have when we did remake them.

• 01:01 Kel

  Yeah, that's a good intro. So I mean, yeah, we both we restarted from scratch basically of what they're both static sites, right. Yours is generated from Hugo.

• 01:14 Joshua

  and it's probably worth mentioning static generators basically take code and turn them into plain HTML and CSS and nothing else. And there are few of those out there. Hugo is one of them. Uh, Jekyll is another one that's quite popular. There are few others that are out there now Gatsby is another one that uses react and JSX and generate static static sites. They're quite a few of them out there now, but the real reason I think both of us joy chose to go with static is the moment you start to do anything service, I'd first off things slow down and second you add in some security risk. PHP itself is one of the most popular languages. That's what WordPress is powered by in a lot of other things. The moment you introduce it, it adds complexity. It adds the ability for people to hack sites and add crazy things to your site. And I've had way too much experience with this in the past.

• 02:10 Kel

  So yeah, it's maintenance. Basically. We chose not to do that because we did not want to maintain the server. And web servers are a lot simpler. All they do is host up a file and your browser runs the code or you know, the HTML, the CSS and whatever minimal JavaScript you're using. So that was the kind of the main thing was just to avoid maintaining a server, which yeah, good decision. Other static sites, ones you'd probably could mention a GitHub pages is a, a really popular option and that is essentially a static site. When I first, uh, my last website was also a static one, I used Hexo, which is a Javascripty one similar to Hugo and the rest of them. Uh, but what I wrote a blog post on that and described it as a really aggressive caching for your server side.

• 02:54 Joshua

  Pretty much.

• 02:54 Kel

  Cause it'll, it just generates all of it on the first one and then it just replies with those every time. So like it has code, it runs that code and it returns a response of a website that was built from templates, but it never changed is it's, it's built once and then you're done.

• 03:11 Joshua

  Now the reason you might want to do that instead of just going and building the HTML and CSS and everything normally is, for example, both of us write a little bit, we both have blogs on there. We post different things like podcast entries. The podcast site itself is actually generated with Hugo as wel and Hugo allows us to put in our blog entries, things like that, and it automatically templates those and sticks them out. So we don't have to go copy and paste a bunch of HTML or if we change the header in one, we don't have to change it in 400 different files where we've got all these different articles and podcast episodes and everything else. We change it in one place and it deals with all of that for us.

• 03:49 Kel

  Yeah, exactly. So I mean all it's doing is building out strings and it's dumping them to text files that are also HTML. So it's not doing anything particularly complicated and each one has different features and that's kind of where things split on the paths we took because instead of using a static site library, I just built my own this time cause like I said, all I wanted is to spit out strings and detects files and that was pretty much it. And so I built my own, it's written in Java script.

• 04:19 Joshua

  The interesting thing about that is it's not that big. They don't actually do that much. And sometimes I think we kind of get into this mode where we think things like this and frameworks and all sorts of things are really, really complex, magical things that nobody could achieve on their own. And well I will admit Kel is a senior developers, so somewhat more experienced than some of the people we're talking to on the podcast. But actually I think this is probably in reach of everybody we're talking to. There's just not that much there.

• 04:50 Kel

  Yeah. If you, if you can write functions and write out text files, you can write your own static site generator. That's pretty much all that's in is reading in files and writing out files

• 05:02 Joshua

  And yeah, and sometimes we just, we overestimate what's in something and that stops us from actually pursuing the things we really want to do. And in some ways I actually, when I started developing software, I was very, very naive and that worked out. I'd probably for the best because I didn't have this preconceived notion that I couldn't do things. So I just went and I tried and I did them.

• 05:26 Kel

  Yeah, exactly. I mean we've talked about impostor syndrome before on the best of that being like things you can and cannot do. And when you're totally naive, you have no idea what those are. So you just do them anyway.

• 05:37 Joshua

  Best situation to be in. And actually I've talked about this before, I suffer a lot from impostor syndrome, but not when it comes to code because I've always had that to this day I still kind of had this naivety that why not, I should be able to do that. Sure.

• 05:52 Kel

  Yeah. Let's see what happens. And yeah, that comes from learning to program and you know, on your own with no feedback, writing apps for yourself, by yourself, you know, you're, you're only, you are your own feedback in those scenarios. So, but yeah, back to the blogging engines.

• 06:09 Joshua

  Well, interestingly that actually does tie in quite nicely to this because the reason we build our own sites and we don't use themes and all kinds of other stuff like that. Alright. To be fair, I have in the past because sometimes I just, I needed to get it done and themes are quick. But one of the reasons we started developing software in the first place was we just wanted to build our own stuff. It's cool, it's fun, it's entertaining. And to this day I still, I get a kick out of building stuff. I like the podcast site or my personal website because there's just fun things that I can do. There's no set goals. Nobody is defining restrictions or anything else like that. For me, I can do whatever I want.

• 06:44 Kel

  I described it in the past as art.

• 06:47 Joshua

  Absolutely.

• 06:47 Kel

  These are my skills and this is what I'm creating. And sometimes I'm creating frameworks and you know, weird graph algorithms and other times I'm, you know, styling CSS and trying to make something pretty like, it's just different types of creation.

• 07:01 Joshua

  Absolutely. Now really back to the websites, I think it'd be good to describe why we continue to keep our portfolios up to date. We tell people all the time it's important to have a portfolio, but I, I don't know that we explain well enough why so probably makes sense just for us to explain why we do it in the first place.

• 07:25 Kel

  Oh, I have a, I have an interesting mental model on how that works. But in general you can kind of tell when something gets dated. They are, the, the, the building blocks of a thing will be things you see around you. You know, you talk about, uh, what is it a great artists steal, right? Like you steal bits and pieces of ideas and you combine them in new and interesting ways, but those building blocks are going to change over time. There'll be new ideas that appear and you're like, Ooh, I should use that. That's actually better than the old building blocks that we're using. Or are you just, you know, you get bored of the old building blocks, so you use different things. And so to a very large extent there is, you know, we update sites because you can kind of tell that, Oh this was built five years ago when this stuff was popular or you know, and if you get too far away from what's mainstream, nobody has any idea, like has no shared context to look at it and go, what does that even mean? You know, at some point it's just words.

• 08:16 Joshua

  Yeah, how do I use this? Where do I get to the blog? Or how do I talk to this person?

• 08:21 Kel

  For an example, a hamburger menu is a great one of, that's a really common form of navigation. Nowadays pretty much everybody knows what it means. But if you go back, you know, 10-15 years ago, that's not necessarily going to be the case. You know, shared visual language is a thing. And when we talk about rebuilding websites, that's a lot of what we're doing is, you know, playing with that visual language and trying to find something that's both simpler and easier and also more fun. And pretty... Yeah. Yeah,

• 08:47 Joshua

  And that is another side of it. I, we just like to make things, we like shiny things, so it's fun to make stuff and actually that's one of the greatest parts of this. It's something that we need. So on the other side of this we're not just keeping it up to date because we're keeping it up to date, we're actually keeping it up to date because there's actually some relevance in people being able to find out who you are. I like Kel's site. The first thing he says is, hi, I'm Kel.

• 09:16 Kel

  It goes well with my business cards.

• 09:17 Joshua

  It leads you into this concept that I'm going to tell you who I am and what I do. And that's really what this is. It's telling people who you are and what you do. Because obviously we're a little bit different in that we're not looking for jobs, we're looking for leads because in both cases we're looking for people to come pay us to build some software, which would be nic...

• 09:39 Kel

  So sort of like a job, but like a job. Yeah. Yeah. The, the audience that's paying us money is slightly different.

• 09:46 Joshua

  Uh, but it amounts to the same thing. We need to prove to them that first off where somebody they want to work with. And second, we're capable of doing the job in the first place. So we need to explain this to them and having a portfolio that really nice, concise and pretty way to show somebody who you are and what you can do.

• 10:04 Kel

  Yeah. So like my page is ridiculously simple. It was built with the help from a friend who does a lot more UX design than I do. Um, but it's in general, it's just the simplistic concept. Follow start at the top, work your way down and it's got a few links to kind of move you off. So, you know, introduces myself, it talks about the things that I provide as a consultant because again, like I'm aiming at an audience that's not necessarily, you know, the same audience as you were doing for her job. So instead I'm listing, um, you know, it's still similar though, like a resume. I'm listing skills and things I do, but they're aimed at more project based rather than, you know, longterm employment. But you know, we also have things like the blog that also describe my own interests and the things I like to talk about and then to the podcast and then, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 10:49 Joshua

  That's actually an interesting point because somebody mentioned this to me when I was asking for feedback and we tell you all the time, ask for feedback when you do the same. I, the moment I finished this thing, in fact I wasn't even done yet, I was about halfway through it and I'm sending out links, Hey, Hey, I need some feedback. Tell me about this. What do you think of this? Do you like this? Getting feedback is really important. One of the pieces of feedback I had was why do you split it a bunch, have a bunch of different pages, not just one big long one and I actually, I fact I didn't take that in and I took a step back and just to validate my reasoning for that, but I did have a valid reason for that. The reason I did it, and Kel did it as well and a lot of sites do it now is because we have to deal with phones. Phones, it's harder to tap on something than it is to swipe and scroll and a lot of sites have switched to this long scrolling page because of mobile phones.

• 11:40 Joshua

  It's much easier for somebody to open it and start to just read through it like they would a book or anything else by scrolling. So there's a specific reason we chose that sort of format and a lot of sites use that sort of format now. It's the same idea as the hamburger menu we're working with, the way that people contextually work within a site, they have certain understandings of how they navigate something and that's become a very viable piece of information for us.

• 12:05 Kel

  Yeah. And then when you, if you kinda like boil things down to like the, the simplest way to communicate to somebody who's going to be linear and you know, linear time, you give them instructions of things in order and that's what happens. Yes. So like a web page, it's all one page and an order is probably pretty accurate. And with links to, you know, you can graph off and branch out to other areas, but in general you can just have this kind of like introductory instruction set that is "welcome!". Yeah. And the simpler and more straightforward you can make that the better. And that's a lot of the, you know, features versus maintainability also applies to information design of how can I get all of this on the screen, how can I let people navigate it and show them all of this stuff all at the same time. Keeping it as simple and as straight forward as possible so that I have to, you know, combine this stuff themselves. The least. I have an interesting way of viewing information technology.

• 12:57 Joshua

  That's another aspect of it though, is this guiding people through a journey because if you just stick a bunch of links in there, people go in whatever order they want. People will click weird things. You never know what they're going to click or what order they're going to do it. You might put them perfectly in the right order and they will just click the third one because people are, one of the things I like about this nice long flowing design is you're guiding through things the way you want them to see it. You're structuring that information just like we advise people do on their CVS or resumes. You have the important information up at the top and then you guide them through things that add up so you don't skip from one section where you're telling them, I build software to, "I love ponies", not just randomly. You guide them into that. You start telling them I build software and then you tell them a little bit about the software you built and why you're good at what you do and maybe some portfolio stuff. And then you'll start to talk a little bit about you and then you can lead into, I like ponies, but if you skip from, I build software to like, I like ponies. There's, it's kind of a jump there.

• 14:03 Kel

  A really common thing to do is to um, Oh and like a UX mock-up. You'll have the flow diagram of what screens move into what screens move into what screens. And you can kind of visualize this as, as it is the graph, right? Like each screen is kind of a, a note on a graph and they link to other things. And that's more or less how I visualize websites. And the simpler I can keep that graph, uh, to get everybody to different and useful locations, the, the faster they can get to the important information. So the better I'm doing. And so, yeah, my page is mostly very linear. I'm describing it very complex and the end result is a site with one, two, three, four, five sections on the main page, which uh, link to individual items of, you know, a couple of blog posts, you know, the blog posts, the, the links to the podcast, some contact info, that sort of thing. So like do, I'm just, we're describing it as kind of a complex thing of information architecture, but simplicity really is the key and simplicity. Like designing a simple and good system actually ends up with a really simple result if you're doing a good job or even an adequate job.

• 15:02 Joshua

  That was one of the keys behind any sort of architecture is taking something really complex and making it simpler. It's the same with code. When we're working with architecture and code, we're trying to take something that's complex and make it simple because simple, it tends to be good. It's not going to break. It's, it's exactly what we like. Simple.

• 15:28 Kel

  You want the simplest thing that does the most and the, those are your two pressures, you know, more functionality but less maintainability, you know, less to maintain less. That can break less, that can go wrong, just as simple as possible while also still doing the most. And you just kind of stack these things. Absolutely. Anywhere we're getting kind of abstract here. We might want to go back to useful tips for a website

• 15:49 Joshua

  straight into actually something about your website in particular. We mentioned simple, you have one image on your entire frontpage.

• 15:57 Kel

  That's pretty great. I have an image on my homepage.

• 15:59 Joshua

  You do the podcast.

• 16:00 Kel

  Oh, that's right. I have the podcast logo. I forgot about that. It's like there's an image on here. I thought I got rid of all them all. Yeah, that was, um, so the whole website was actually based off of my business cards, which I tried to make business cards a few years back and I got really frustrated because I didn't like any of the designs and I kept trying to make things and then I ended up making them and in ASCII art. So they were, um, totally text-based. I just removed all of the images. I pulled them on mu, I, I, you know, built borders with dashes. I drew my name out and you know like ASCII art Kel and things like that. And so that was kind of the inspiration for the website was to keep it all text space. And so for the most part the website is done with fonts and text. It looks a bit like code. There's some courier on there, some monospace funds to kind of give it that feel. Um, so yeah, I went with no images. I didn't want to to make it complex. The one exception is the, the uh, getting up on podcast cause I wanted to draw attention to that and it has its own branding that is not just extra hole.

• 16:58 Joshua

  Yeah. You mentioned something there that's worth mentioning. It's not directly related to portfolio sites, but it is somewhat related. You mentioned Moo, moo.com. Yup. If I'm going to recommend any company that prints out business cards, it's got to be moo.com. Every order, it's easy. They always come out perfectly. The card stock is incredible. They are not cheap. I won't say they're cheap, but they're worth it. Yeah.

• 17:26 Kel

  Yeah. They're not the most efficient. You could squeeze out quality for money if you look harder. But it's a pretty, yeah, it's a pretty hard one to eat. I haven't had any trouble negotiating them though. I haven't actually looked into their business past businesses, which I probably should do before. I recommend them to strongly. Um, but yeah, they've been, they've been pretty solid. So yeah, most of my cards were from mu too, but that was, I used the text template, which was pretty limited in what you can get away with. And constraints are good for creativity, I guess.

• 17:56 Joshua

  There you go. I, yeah, I only recommend them, not necessarily because I know anything about their business practices or their personal preferences or anything else, but every time I order from anybody else, I ended up disappointed. Yeah. So

• 18:09 Kel

  speaking of your sight, your, when of course like a different direction, you have a lot of images because your site is a lot more portfolio based, whether while mine is, Oh, it's what it is, I'm very textual, as a programmer it kind of makes sense. I do a lot of backend code. I work a lot on abstract concepts. I work a lot in graph theory and AI lately. So yeah, it kind of makes sense that mine's a little more abstract and a little bit more technical and texty all yours though is very visual because that's where you spend a lot of your time. And I really enjoy seeing a very visual portfolio.

• 18:41 Joshua

  I am a very visual person. I won't say I'm the best designer or artists or anything else on the planet, but it's something I enjoy. So when I'm doing my personal site, I look for things that I enjoy because it's for me, I am it is for other people. But to start with, I always assume that anything I'm doing that's a personal project is for me because I'm going to enjoy it a lot more if I'd look at it that way. So yeah, I went with visual I and oddly I started out very textual. The first few sections of it are all text. In fact, the one image you have is for the podcast. And I went completely the other way around and I went for the branding with just the colours. I didn't stick the logo in there at all. I just went for that. Bright pink is the one big, big bright pink section on my site that he's getting apps done because pink has kind of become the default colour for the podcast for whatever reason.

• 19:32 Kel

  That's yeah, I think you picked that as in the logo and the gradient and the purple was kind of boring. It wasn't exciting, but the pink was fun.

• 19:40 Joshua

  It ended up that way. But otherwise the visual language, yeah, I went with the whole thing is visual. Even when I was not putting in pictures, I went with visual things. The pink was the piece that makes getting apps done stands out because that's the way I enjoy it. It's also part of what I do. A lot of what I do is building mockups and designing things, so that's an important aspect of it.

• 20:05 Kel

  And when you think about mockups, if especially like a like UX mock-ups and you actually look at kind of minimal versions of those, a lot of times they just skip images. The images are not important. The, the rest of the structure, the words, the layout, where things go. Like when you're, when you're talking about information architecture, a lot of times the actual information is secondary to what you're trying to do. Um, so yeah, like images aren't always necessary.

• 20:29 Joshua

  Yup. To be honest, when I do start out with things, the images I use are extremely basic. They are representations of things. Uh, in fact, quite often I will just start out by writing something down on paper and I won't use images at all. You use words log in and then an arrow.

• 20:48 Kel

  Yeah, exactly. And I mean when you, when you do the really minimal mockups, a lot of times, even in other words, you just have button shapes and you know, lines that represent taxed and things like that. And you know, you just kind of plug in your own information.

• 21:00 Joshua

  I'm not even talking to that visual. I will just literally write the word log in and then have an arrow that goes to dashboard, then an arrow that goes somewhere else. Exactly.

• 21:10 Kel

  I really think about all these things in terms of graph theory because that's you're describing a graph right? And pretty each node has context and can get more and more complex the more you dig into it and things like that. So yeah, I actually really liked the, the website you ended up with. I was, I was kind of surprised cause it looks a lot different than your normal sites and yet is also simpler and very straight forward. I really, I don't know, I just really enjoyed what you ended up with.

• 21:32 Joshua

  I uh, I quite often I will pick a theme and I'll go with that because again, in the past I've had to keep these things up to date because as we said at the beginning, you kind of need to, otherwise it starts to look dated. It starts to have things, I won't have a hamburger icon or it will in two years when suddenly they're out of date because now we have pizza icons or whatever it is.

• 21:55 Kel

  Pi.

• 21:55 Joshua

  Pi icon. mmmm pie... anyway....

• 21:59 Kel

  Actually I was just having a flashback to that old movie. The net right where the pi icon was the, the, the like the Illuminati on every website. Yeah. That was a long time ago. Um, yeah, so like what you're describing, like we have to update, you'll notice, um, if you've ever worked in a company that has like a web app, like a SaaS app, there's a development cycle for that. And then there's a completely separate unrelated and kind of an explicable development cycle for their actual website, the marketing page. And that's kind of what's happening is the marketing language changes constantly. Like that's the part that has to move the fastest. Your audience changes the things you're pushing to, your audience changes what works and what doesn't doesn't work. Like your, your AB testing kind of like that top layer the most. And so that happens a lot.

• 22:45 Kel

  Yeah. You end up having to update that top level portfolio to say, Hey, look at this new stuff. If nothing else. And you might find out that this new stuff deserves more attention. And that changes the whole architecture of what you're trying to display to people. Yeah. I mean if you've got a new job, you're going to change your resume, and so it's very similar in concept that when things change, when you change what your advertising changes, you're going to have to update your marketing site and if you're in there anyway, you might as well make it pretty.

• 23:12 Joshua

  Absolutely. A really good example of that is fairly recently when one of the drivers for this is, we've kind of been putting it off, but content marketing is a huge thing and obviously we have the podcast and we write articles and these things. I didn't have it on my website at all. Kel, you had some on yours, but...

• 23:32 Kel

  I had blog entries. Yeah. For me originally this was because when you search my name, it's impossible not to find me and I wanted it to be me that you found and not like an old house mortgage or something. So,

• 23:42 Joshua

  Yeah, I don't have that option apparently either I am a bestselling author or somebody in bandages in a video game.

• 23:50 Kel

  Oh yeah, I forgot about that. Yeah. Um,

• 23:52 Joshua

  that's all that ever comes up under my name. I fall somewhere on the 834th page on Google.

• 23:58 Kel

  Yeah, I've never decided if that's good or not. Like my name is a really good index. Like if you want to find me, you'll find me pretty quick. But that does have downsides. There are days that I'd like to be anonymous. My old online names rather than being unique were actually generic because it was my way to get away from having a unique name, which is why my GitHub is still decoy and there are lots of decoys. So yeah, back to information architecture, your website. Oh, and of course at the very bottom we're talking pictures. You actually included personality, which we are big fans of and photography.

• 24:31 Joshua

  I front loaded and back-loaded on this case. The first thing you read about me, this is about me and actually the first thing I say is outside of tech. And I explained a couple things that are important about me. First off that I'm an American living in the United Kingdom. The second that I'm a father. Uh, and that's a big deal to me is probably more important to me than anything else. So that is the first thing I want people to know because if they're going to work with me, that's something that's gotta be important. But then as Kel says, photography is another thing that's really important to me and I have often left it out because I didn't, you know, for as much as I encourage people to have some personality on their site and in their portfolios and everything else, I didn't really actually put any of my photography on there. And that is a huge part of me because I am a hobbyist photographer. I'm not bad at it.

• 25:24 Kel

  That's kind of worth talking about on its own actually. Cause we tend to avoid displaying things about ourself that we're not sure how other people react. Like a photography's a good one. Like I don't include a lot of my old photography mainly because I don't do it so much anymore. But a lot of it's also because it's alright and I don't know if I want to, you know, show that off. Here's the thing I created. I don't know how good it is, but like that's something that it's good to show yourself. Just always like even the stuff that, you know, whatever level the stuff is at, we talk about that with portfolio projects and github. It doesn't have to be perfect. It just should show as best as you can where you're at, what your skill levels are at. People like it, it's fine. It's okay. Joshua is a great photographer, like these are really good pictures and it took a while though to get to that stage where we felt comfortable showing a lot of these things. I don't think that's necessarily a good thing. Like it really is that, that that line of when you start to show these things off should be when it's important to you, not necessarily when it's important to other people. Like keep yourself in mind.

• 26:25 Joshua

  Yeah, absolutely. I photography was important to me before I moved to the UK. Kel and I were off running around shooting things together and at the time.

• 26:35 Kel

  Most of my stuff is from that era.

• 26:37 Joshua

  At the time it was extremely important to me, but I wasn't able to reveal that to anybody else. That was something I put in special accounts on... you know, at the time Deviantart was the big thing at the time and it just kind of lived on there. In fact, I didn't even use my online screen name for it. I came up with a completely different one just because I didn't want to set, I wanted it separate from everything else because I wasn't certain about it. And you know, it comes back to that impostor syndrome thing. There's so many things that we work on that we're really proud of, but we don't share with other people because we're worried about it. And...

• 27:10 Kel

  You're worried about how they'll react.

• 27:12 Joshua

  Yeah. But your personal site needs to be those things. Exactly. Because those are the things that are important to you. And part of this, the whole point behind this and the reason why I build this and I don't just have my LinkedIn portfolio and nothing else is because this is my one place where I can show off me, not just the one small portion of me that builds software but the rest of me as well. Right.

• 27:38 Kel

  And like it... kind of talking about the information architecture and taking people on a journey. Like what do you come to my page? I am my, the main journey I'm trying to take you on is please give me money and I will write you software. Um, so the secondary journeys, and that's kind of probably why your photography's at the end of the list rather than at the top that like, I do want you to keep going on this journey, but I'm going to start you with the things that aim you at the audience. Like the audience that I'm most interested in is the one that's interested in this stuff. And the deeper you dig, the happier I am, the more you learn about me, the happier I am. But yeah, I'm gonna, I'm gonna start with this stuff. That's the audience, the the advertisement that I'm trying to sell.

• 28:16 Joshua

  Yeah, absolutely. And even with that though, as I said, I front-loaded some personal as well because when you are selling to a company that you want to hire you or to a recruiter or to a lead who's going to pay you to build some software, it's not just the technical credentials they're looking for because lots and lots of people have technical credentials. Particularly if you're an entry level developer, there are so many people who have the exact same experience as you. That is just ridiculous. And that's why it's so hard to get that first job. I heard somebody say the other day that they were on the 48th rejection or something like that. It's just ridiculous. But there's just a lot of competition out there. And what makes you stand out isn't that experience. It's who you are. So again, while we do want to front load the things that will sell you for as a great developer, you also need to put a little bit of view in there.

• 29:10 Joshua

  Just make sure that there's enough in there that somebody gets the idea that if you're a joker, you're a joker. If you are a very serious person, you're a serious person. If you love puppies that you love puppies. If you run for cancer every other week or whatever it is, put a little bit of that in there. Make sure that it's kind of sewn in throughout your site. Not just one big section at the very bottom but a little bit here and there that just kind of shows off. This is the sort of person I am. This is the sort of person that you'd be working with.

• 29:41 Kel

  I want to, I want to take a little quick, you mentioned, uh, that, you know, 48 rejection letters or whatever, but I want to actually, we were describing our website's a bit like a resume, like a portfolio and it's a thing people look at. But if you look at the metrics, what's the bounce rate on your average website? So how many people actually show up versus how many actually interact. So that's kind of like your feedback and the percentage is what, 2% maybe.

• 30:07 Joshua

  It depends on the type of site. I've had some that were up to 50% but in general, yeah, it's not, it's abysmal. It's horrible.

• 30:14 Kel

  Exactly. And so you're talking about thousands of rejections. So it's not really about the rejection and that that that's just feedback. It's like any other type of feedback, it's a yay or nay. It's like, Oh that didn't work. Okay, well try again. And so fast feedback is good and a lot of what we've been seeing in the job markets is getting faster feedback and which is a little bit better. Like at least people are actually getting rejection letters nowadays,

• 30:38 Joshua

  sometimes.

• 30:38 Kel

  That's better than it was about 10 years ago when that was completely unheard of. So, but like it automates it and I, there's obvious problems with that, but the faster that feedback cycle gets where you apply and then they can decide or reject, the faster you can move on too. So there's that, that number a big number is not a bad thing. It really is not really concerned yourself. With your time frames cause that's really the only important thing, right? Like how much time do we have? Time and safety is pretty much the only two things you should probably be worrying about.

• 31:11 Joshua

  Absolutely. Speaking of time, we have rambled on about our sites for a while...

• 31:15 Kel

  A good time to wrap up.

• 31:18 Joshua

  It is. It probably is, but I, I just, I thought it would be good to share some of the reasons why we build these, why we make the decisions we do and just some practical advice that... we even fit in. A little bit of tech in there at the beginning. That's cool. We don't do much technical.

• 31:35 Kel

  Hmm. True. Do't want to get too techy. But yeah, mostly non technical.

• 31:41 Joshua

  Mostly nontechnical.

• 31:44 Joshua

  Alright. I will put some transcripts up at gettingappsdone.com. Uh, I, as I always say, please be sure to check out my website at joshuagraham.info and Kel's website at piffner.com because they're awesome.

• 31:57 Kel

  And they're just updated and shiny.

• 31:58 Joshua

  They're just updated. They are shiny and pretty and modern and everything else. So, uh...

• 32:02 Kel

  Or yeah, something like that.

• 32:04 Joshua

  Check it out. And again, as I said, we love feedback. So if you want to give us some feedback or if you've got some suggestions or you've got some questions about why we did things, or you want to know about Hugo, or you want to steal Kel's generator or whatever you want to do..

• 32:17 Kel

  GitHub! It's on GitHub.

• 32:20 Joshua

  Yeah, so I'm not going to tell you the address. You have to come to gettingappsdone.com/slack and ask us about it and we'll tell you.

• 32:30 Kel

  Great.

• 32:31 Joshua

  They call that a lead magnet.

• 32:35 Kel

  Content marketing.

• 32:36 Joshua

  Content marketing. Alright. We post every Thursday. Uh, so we'll be back next week. Until then. Thanks for listening.

• 32:44 Kel

  Cheers.