An experiment in remote work forum boards
Frustrated with my own experience with forum boards, I decided to build my own. I was looking for a place that satisfied these problems: job listings, submitted links, a leaderboard, and an emailed digest of both — daily. I was inspired by sidebar.io.
How hard could it be?
Turns out, uhh pretty difficult.
I put my prototype together with Laravel and SCSS. Stupid simple. Lightweight and pretty speedy. I took a few playbooks from levelsio, and tried making my application with a simple stack. PHP and SQLite. Worked out pretty ok, but not sure it would have worked with more than a hundred users or so 😅
The idea:
- a logged-out homepage that showcases top links/discussions from users but has a hero dedicated to gathering emails to drive a daily email digest campaign
- a logged-in homepage that encourages reading of links from a remote-friendly users base.
- a leaderboard of top users
- a Stripe-powered automatic promotion-system
- a remote-work job board
Learnings:
- Uptime is hard, even harder trying to solidify a deployment pipeline for Laravel apps for free. Jenkins and Deployer worked like a charm. Envoyer and Forge are great if you’re willing to spend money.
- I enjoyed working with Laravel a lot, but I ended up spending way too much time configuring and not a lot of time building. What I love about the npm way of building is I can go 0–60mph in no time at all.
