Why I am trying to publish on Medium

I have been pushing myself to write more and there are two things keeping me from the goal of 1 good article a week.

One is that I want to share content that is meaningful, that brings the reader something they can use in their work or in their personal day-to-day tasks.

The other, that it is getting harder and harder to drive readers to this blog.

The Social Media landscape looks like it is going through a lot of changes. The Buffer team shared some of their insight on this on a recent blog post. The amount of content we produce keeps growing and filters are failing.

Medium offers a new way of organising and suggesting content and for long I have been meaning to give it a try.

What tipped the scales and made me publish an article there was actually a conversation between the team and Mike Monteiro. Mike asked a question and pointed out an issue he sees in the current design.

Hey @Medium, did you kill text over the header image?

— Mike Monteiro (@monteiro) October 27, 2015

What followed was an healthy discussion and a first step in Mike lending a hand with his expertise.

@brunoamaral @Medium Delighted, but not surprised. They’ve always been responsive to feedback. Good people making a tool.

— Mike Monteiro (@monteiro) October 28, 2015

That’s what won my trust. Being transparent, working on building something and listening to what users are saying.

If you want to read my first contribution to Medium, it’s just a click away.

Photos were kindly provided by Mário Pires, of Alves&Pires. Give them a call if you are looking for a good content creation team in Lisbon.

The true measure of a startup

I confess, I am a workaholic

But how could I not be? This first half of the year has been filled with some great projects, both at ClubJudge and in other quick freelancing projects.

The first, and dare I say sexiest, was the chance to help out the Shoe Committee in moving from WordPress to Squarespace. Now I have been helping define a business model for the blog to become self sufficient.

This was not the usual “lets just move to Squarespace and be done with it”. The decision was made in an effort to cut down severely on the technical skill required to manage the blog and make changes to the layout. At the same time we know the blog is going to need some development added to it. Squarespace came up as being the best choice for this because it allows us to scale the blog and even upgrade to a pricing scheme where we can make all the changes possible to the template.

After that, Criada Malcriada was the most fun I ever had developing a website. This a site for a comic strip. The author and the fantastic team came up to me saying they wanted to bootstrap together a site in the shortest deadline ever.

Everything was literally done over dinner! We ordered pizza, made jokes and when we left 90% of the work was done with a WordPress blog powering the comic strip and sharing it’s template with a Shopify store. The next hurdle was to export 700 comic strips from the Facebook page. After quite some tinkering with the Facebook API, wordpress was finally importing part of the content, albeit still linking the images to facebook’s servers.

With a bash script and a lot of patience the files were downloaded to the hosting server and the old links replaced.

Yes, I am a workaholic. But I get to do some interesting stuff and work with great people. It all evens out in the end.

UXLX notes and takeaways

Update: the UXLX team also published their coverage of the event on Lanyrd.com

What follows is a mess. These are the notes I took while attending UXLX this last week. Three days packed with workshops and presentations turned out to be a crash course in User Experience, at least for me.

I found the parallels with things I have already been doing and from the discussions and conversations that followed I feel I took away a new perspective on how those things can be done in a more efficient and effective way. It was an opportunity to see first hand the method and process that UX needs in a startup or in an established brand.

So by the time I reached the second day I was taking notes like crazy. Then I posted everything on twitter for others to use.

The full stack of notes is bellow, in its raw form with typos and poor format, scribbled urls and little structure in how each concept ties to the next. I am hoping that despite these flaws you will be able to take something away from it.

Did anything change?

Yes. I now feel more confident in taking on UX tasks and I got a foothold that allows me to dig for more information if I need to. For that, I owe a huge thank you to Bruno Figueiredo and the whole team behind the conference. They did a great job!

If you would like to read up more about the conference, take a look at the Sketch notes by Per Axbom, and take some time to listen to the interviews of the speakers by the UX Podcast.

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