Joe M.

🍰 Formcake was made to solve a simple but common problem: You have a contact form, lead page, or survey, but you don’t want to spin up an entire server just to field that one form’s submissions. Enter Formcake - you sign up, create a form, and get an endpoint that looks like formcake.com/api/forms/<YOUR_FORM_ID/submissions that you can put into your <form> tag’s action endpoint. You can then configure success and error redirects if you want them, or just have the user stay on the current page - or you can incorporate an AJAX call to submit the form and display your own success / error message.

The form market is huge. Everyone wants to make drag-n-drop, marketing and growth hacker-friendly forms that can do everything from lead capture to payment processing. And so naturally, I asked … maybe there’s room for me? But seriously, with a lot you get less-than-stellar design, clunky widgets, and unwieldy WYSIWYGs. That’s why a few friends and I decided to dream up an MVP based on making the Stripe or Slack of form companies - something that works hard through efficient UX to reduce cognitive load and just be easier at all the things, generally.

Landing your first “Software Developer” or “Web Developer” position is a big get. More than a designer-who-programs or a writer-who-markups, taking on a role where your principal responsibility is coding is a big step in any technology career. You could be thinking about a career transition or graduating a bootcamp or computer science program - this article has five tips, some less earth-shattering than others, that nevertheless will help you on your search.

Three weeks ago we launched jobletter. Since then, we’ve been promoting the site, collecting feedback from friends, and experimenting with with a more open approach to writing about our process. All that culminated in us reaching a milestone this past Friday - our first email. Over the past week we’d worked with a freelancer to deliver an email template, as well as winnow down the jobs we’d been collecting. We wanted a good mix of industries, company sizes and technology stacks - emphasizing location-independent postings like businesses hiring in multiple locations, or startups open to hiring remote junior workers (harder to find, but they exist).

Recently my business partner and I launched a new service, jobletter.io with a simple premise: We deliver Junior Developer jobs to your inbox. Breaking into development to get those all-important first two years of production experience is long, exhausting work, filled with pouring through a lot of “Software Developer - 5+ years req” posts and keyword salads where your prospective employer’s stack includes Every Goddamn Thing™. It makes the idea of a short list of quality, curated, 0 years of experience-and-up jobs, delivered to you, pretty appealing.

When I was setting out to revamp my personal blog and create a new site for my book, I had a couple of considerations in mind. I wanted both sites to be highly-available (I don’t get much traffic, but also don’t want a hug of death), simple (with as few moving parts as possible), and easy-to-update and generally extend. All of that led me to a static workflow. Settling on (but not for) Static I love static sites.

All writers have their own workflows for writing: Many people use Word, Google Docs, or Libre Office - George R.R. Martin famously uses WordStar, a DOS-based text-processing system from the mid-80s. As long as your personal productivity is juiced and you’re comfortable, you can be as idiosyncratic as you want. Somewhere a hardcore cypherpunk is writing the next cryptographic epic in vim. In that spirit, I’ve evolved my own writing process over time as I’ve looked for a workflow that minimized application overhead, allowed me to translate documents between formats, provided robust version tracking, integrated well with other tools, and worked offline.