I did an 8-day sprint to launch my Build a Ruby Gem email course and documented my progress through this series of blog posts.

Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Day 4 | Day 5 | Day 6 | Weekend Update Summary

Hope you had a great weekend!

Aside from hibernating inside due to the 6 extra inches of snow that wasn’t predicted, I spent some time with the course content this weekend. In efforts to do a final proofread, I noticed something wasn’t quite right. My goal for this course was to smooth over the conventions of a Ruby gem that go much less talked about. However, because I naively chose a gem that included Rails integration as the example, the content ended up being more about Rails than I had planned.

I thought about it for a bit on Saturday and decided it was best to rewrite the content around a simpler gem example. So that my Sunday!

I thought about how I ended up down this path and realized it’s because I didn’t put enough planning in to the actual content. Early on, I sketched our a very rough outline of the lessons in the course, but never thought about the examples or which gem to use. I originally picked on of my recent written gems for Rails and assumed it was simple enough that I could quickly gloss over the Rails details. But the last thing I wanted was for the Rails topics to cloud the steps need to build a basic Ruby Gem.

Examples are really hard. I ended up choosing a topic that is probably not supremely useful in an everyday Ruby application, however, the conventions and theories apply to any gem.

I do plan to cover Rails integration in a future publication. There are so many hooks in to the framework when using a Railtie, it almost deserves a separate course. I did save the removed content, so I’ll have to figure out where it’s best presented.

What I Accomplished This Weekend

As mentioned above, I rewrote the course content around a simpler gem example. It did simplify the course, so I hope it’ll be easier to navigate for those that are less familiar with Ruby.

I also designed a landing page for the course that I’m really excited about. Web design has always been one of the skills that I’ve struggled with. I can generally get it 70-80% there, but never have it look really polished. I’ve spent more time doing that lately and finally feel like I’m hitting the mark.

The only thing left to do is proofread the course content and setup the course drip campaign in Mailchimp.

Launch Date

I’m excited to announce the course will launch this Wednesday (12/11) at 7AM EST. I’ll send an announcement on Wednesday morning with the registration URL.

Marketing

Signups continued to trickle in throughout the weekend and I added another 30 subscriptions to this update list:

The link in Ruby Weekly amounted to 117 newsletter subscription (almost 25% of the total visits). There’s been no other channel even close to that level of conversion.

During the process of posting course updates, I’ve come across a few other channels that I thought would be valuable sources of traffic after launch. I plan to post to those sites sometime Wednesday and am interested to see how they do relative to the sources I’ve been using.