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DeChamp
DeChamp

Posted on • Updated on

I built a new website to help developers. It's small now but will have hundreds of tools, resources and more... Check it out!

Hi everyone! Thanks for stopping by. I'm really excited to show you my new website. I've been pumping out work lately and I'm loving my productivity.

TL;DR

My new site. https://coder.exchange

The Details

I wrote back how I was struggling with perfection and imposter syndrome. You can read about it here 25 years of coding, and I'm just beginning.

So I've been busy last year or so working on just releasing my projects. No more making it "Perfect" because there is literally no such thing.

I found myself still doing the "One more thing and then I'll release..." x 1000 lol. I just keep wanting to add more and more.

The venture I've been on is about learning about myself, my hangups and my awesome abilities.

So I've release two site within just a little over a month. Pretty damn happy about that.

Please let me know your thoughts. Got a tool you wanna add? I'm hoping this becomes a community thing where everyone starts to join and wants to be part of it!

I have a lot of ideas for it so feel free to message me if you wanna be part of it. :)

Ideas to expand the coder.exchange...

Current Todo

  • Profiles
    • personal settings
    • tool positioning
    • light/dark theme
  • Tools
    • ability to pass data between tools
    • share capabilities
    • easy way to allow users to add their own
    • ability to add tools to community
    • tool selection (hide/show)
    • state of tools (keeps history)
  • Resources
    • community provided
    • ability to vote on usefulness
    • ability to mark as useless resource
    • commenting
  • Chat
  • many more...

Tool on there way

  • timestamp
  • stopwatch
  • timer (count down)
  • white noise (already done, just have to tweak)
  • file sharing
  • screenshot tool
  • meditation/break/mental health tools
    • guided meditation
    • visuals for relaxing
    • docs/videos/resources on mental health

Thank you for your time!

~DeChamp

Request

Can you pretty please go to my sites and actually use them? I suck as SEO and I've never been able to get traffic to any of my creations much more than a few visits. It would mean a lot to me! Thanks in advanced!

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Top comments (5)

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shnydercom profile image
Jonathan Schneider

Hi there, I like the websites in that they work, but the UX requires a lot of thinking. On mobile the first one leaves the menu static over half the screen and the character generator showed me an animated ad for crypto punks (blinking characters), so I thought that was my character. It took a while until I figured out how it works. If you show images of the end result or adjust the copy to say what can be expected after the next step, that already does a lot. Also I didn't quite get why I should drag around the cards, especially on mobile where the card takes up the whole screen, and I can't drop it anywhere.
I've made a good experience with hiring a freelance designer to explain my own concept first. And only once the drafts that came back matched enough with my imagination I would start work on the interface. I would then use parts of my explanations in copy, prefill values so that there's always a "result" and it only needs to be tweaked by the user etc.
And still even then, asking for and getting feedback is hard. So, kudos for presenting your work! 😊

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dechamp profile image
DeChamp

Thank you so much. I appreciate the feed back. So part of my journey of not making it perfect before shipping, was putting off mobile design for now. I use these tools myself and it makes more sense in a desktop world. However, with Coder.exchange, I want that to be a community site so it'll be getting mobile with in the next few weeks.

It's great to hear the "ad" confused you. I will find a better way to represent that. How did the instructions fair? I was going to actually add the ability to "preload" a set of characters to allow others to play with it. So looks like i need to keep on that path and get it implemented. Can you tell me more details about the freelancer and how that works? It sounds like a good idea.

Thank you for taking the time to respond to my post.

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shnydercom profile image
Jonathan Schneider

Sure, I've struggled a lot with my own projects explanations, but the way better instructions have an impact is actually measurable. So you could put some analytics on the site to measure where people are, hover and click. Some tools offer an over-the-shoulder view, I find that a bit intrusive though.

Having something pre-loaded and placeholders in input fields is also a simple way to save on implementing validations... ;) But on a more serious note, in a previous job I worked on a funnel where simply telling users they can re-do a step actually worked wonders on conversion.

So with the freelancer this was the end-result
Before that, I did a couple of sketches, but wasn't really happy with those. When you post on upwork for example, lots of designers can see it, so it forces you to write it in a non-technical way. If you don't, people already shy away from the project. By the responses you get, you can kind of tell how well you communicated non-technically, and I was also very clear about it being open-ended. There are lots of people who want to "sell" what they want you to have, but you want to "sell" through the image they produce. I found someone who had done graphics for technical blog posts and was interested in doing science-illustrations, and she could show me how she worked with pencil-drafts in previous projects. It fit with my project, because it's a proof of concept, and I needed to explain it in a simple medium. In your case, you already have the medium, so maybe trying that process with a UI designer might help. In the past, I've made the experience that it's sometimes good to have a single paper to print out so you can hand it to people. If you can communicate the whole idea like that it's really valuable (I think I'm slowly getting there, going through different print-outs). But I'm also just pinching my feet in the water of marketing :)

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p1r4t0s profile image
Jacks

Thanks for share dude :)

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dechamp profile image
DeChamp

and thank you!