Original Source: https://ecommerce-platforms.com/articles/ikas-review

Although finding a suitable ecommerce platform for your business is essential, it can also be time-consuming. There are so many popular solutions out there – Shopify, Bigcommerce, and Wix, to name a few!

However, there are also emerging platforms worth considering for their unique offers, and this review does precisely that.

We’re zoning in on one such ecommerce solution designed to suit businesses of all sizes: ikas.

In this ikas review, I’ll discuss the features, pros, cons, and prices of this platform and then provide a step-by-step guide for using it.

That’s a ton of information to get through, so let’s make a start on this ikas review!

ikas Review: My Bottom Line Upfront

If you haven’t got time to read through my entire ikas review, here’s a quick summary:

ikas is an ecommerce platform suitable for all business sizes, but it places particular emphasis on small and medium-sized businesses and solopreneurs.

Users can create online stores within minutes without any technical knowledge or expertise with ikas. You can sell physical and digital products on your ikas store and manage omnichannel selling on various marketplaces, including Amazon (all from the convenience of a single dashboard).

It’s worth noting that your marketplace inventory automatically updates when you make a sale on your ecommerce website.

ikas offers a free 7-day trial and three price plans after that. Each plan includes a generous number of features, including free customer support, 16 contemporary website themes, an SSL certificate, unlimited product uploads, site traffic, and web space.

Themes are customizable and can be modified using the ikas drag-and-drop theme editor. ikas also offers a range of marketing and automation features on each price plan.

Abandoned cart reminders and marketing promotions (e.g., 3 for the price of 2) are available on all plans.

What is ikas?

Founded in 2017, ikas has offices in Berlin and Aalen, Germany, as well as Istanbul and Ankara, Turkey. It’s primarily aimed at European and Turkish eCommerce entrepreneurs and companies, and at the time of writing, 6,000 businesses use it to fuel their websites.

Its website has testimonials from some of its prominent customers, including OzNatur ,LSTNR clothing, and Hofkueche.

ikas’s site tells us that you can “easily build your eCommerce website in three straightforward steps” and boost sales using its marketing automation features. We’ll explore this in more detail below.

Every aspect of your e-commerce site is managed from a single dashboard, and you don’t need any technical knowledge to use the platform.

Selling products from your ikas e-commerce store is seamless, and omnichannel selling is just as easy – this includes physical stores and online marketplaces such as Amazon and Zalando.

You can sell physical and digital products using ikas, and it’s also worth highlighting that ikas is powered by AWS servers across Europe.

Each price plan includes a free SSL certificate, PCI-secure payments, and unlimited product, traffic, and web space.

ikas Features

Now we’ve covered the basics, let’s turn our attention to ikas’s core features:

Website Themes: There are 16 image-led, contemporary, and attractively designed themes to choose from.

One-Page Checkout: Each ikas theme offers a one-page checkout, i.e., customers can complete purchases from the convenience of one page. This includes adding their name, address, shipping method, and payment.

Theme Editor: You can customize these themes using ikas’s drag-and-drop template editor. More specifically, you can edit images, text, videos, and other content to suit your brand. You can also SEO-optimize themes (i.e., add meta tags, titles, and descriptions).

ikas App Store: Accessible via your ikas dashboard, Integrations are split into the following categories:

Fulfillment and Logistics: integrates with SendCloud

Accounting: integrates with Zero and PDF Invoices

Marketplace: integrates with Printful

International Commerce: ikas integrates with UPS, OPLOG, Navlungo, and Sendcloud. This lets you provide customers with localized product prices, website translation, and currencies. You can also offer shoppers the following payment options: Stripe, PayPal, and Klarna.

Digital Marketing Integrations: With just a few clicks, you can integrate your ikas store with Google Analytics 4, Google Tag Manager, and Universal Analytics. You can also add your TikTok Pixel and Facebook Pixels to your store. Plus, you have access to conversion APIs.

Dashboard: From the convenience of your dashboard, you can manage all your Amazon and Zalando orders, as well as your eCommerce website and physical stores. Every sale you make is automatically logged on the dashboard. So, if you make a sale via your ikas eCommerce site, your Amazon and Zalando inventory is automatically updated.

Reports: From your dashboard, you can create 36 different reports, including conversion reports over various periods, products frequently bought together, best-selling product categories, and more.

Unlimited Product Uploads: You can upload and sell as many products as you want. Simply add products via your dashboard and import products via a CSV or XLSX file. You can add products as a single product upload or as variant products (i.e., multiple products with different attributes such as color and size).

Marketing and Automation: The cart reminder feature automatically generates targeted SMS and email campaigns if customers abandon their carts. These campaigns can include discount codes and encourage shoppers to return to their carts to complete their purchases. There are also ikas’s cross-selling and up-selling options, which allow you to offer discounted and non-discounted products on your checkout page.

Advanced Product Search: Among other search settings, you can create filters to help customers find products easily on your online store. You can also set keywords for products you wish to highlight when customers search.

Wish Lists: You can allow customers to create wish lists of products for future browsing and possible purchase.

SEO Optimization via Meta Title and Description Length Checker: See if your meta tags, meta product titles, and meta descriptions are the ideal length (50 to 60 characters for a tag and 120-158 for a description). Simply type in your proposed meta title and description, and the tool will show it in red if it’s too short and green if it’s an acceptable length. You can also see what your meta titles and descriptions look like on Google Desktop View and Google Mobile View.

Unlimited Site Traffic: ikas doesn’t impose bandwidth restrictions, allowing you to drive as much traffic as you want to your site (including on busy eCommerce holidays such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday).

Unlimited Web Space: There aren’t any limitations on the number or size of the website files you can store on ikas’s data centers.

ikas Pricing

Aside from its free seven-day trial, ikas offers three pricing plans. All prices are in euros, including VAT, and can be paid using Stripe or PayPal:

Starter: €25/mo paid annually or €35/mo month-to-month

Hero: €69/mo paid annually or €99/mo month-to-month (this is the most popular plan)

All-in-One: €199/mo paid annually or €299/mo month-to-month

All plans offer the following:

A “lightning-fast” e-commerce storefront

Free customer support

FreeSSL certificate

SEO optimization

Sales reports

Unlimited product uploads/sales, site visitors, and web space

16 website themes to choose from

One-page checkouts

Cart reminder campaigns

Wish lists

Product reviews

Access to digital marketing and online marketplace integrations

Returns management

You can sell physical and digital products worldwide

You can set shipping zones based on postcodes

Sell and manage in-store products

You can create pricing and shipping offers

Access to inventory management

However, the following features are per plan:

Starter Plan

Access all the above and:

5 employee accounts

3 stock locations (stores and warehouses)

Hero Plan

All the above and:

10 employee accounts

Several online shops

Send automated abandoned cart reminders (these can include discount codes) via email, SMS, and Whatsapp messages (Whatsapp is optional)

Product reviews – (customers can include photos)

Optional cross-selling and upselling features

Social login (customers can log into your website with their Google and Facebook accounts)

You can offer customizable products (i.e., customers can customize these products with their brand’s texts and graphics)

Extended campaign management

You can offer customers the option to ‘Click and collect.’

You can offer local delivery from your store during opening hours.

Amongst other things, you can send SMS notifications to customers about their order status.

Manage up to six stock locations (your warehouses and stores)

All-in-One Plan

You benefit from all of the above features, plus:

15 employee accounts

AI-fuelled product recommendations

Cart reminders via WhatsApp

10 stock locations

Advanced cross-selling and upselling

Extended product reviews

Advanced product search

Extended sales reports

Multicurrency online stores

B2B functions and tools

Lastly, ikas Premium is also an option. Prices aren’t available for this plan; instead, you have to complete a form with your details, and the ikas team will call you to negotiate a custom plan.

It offers everything in the ‘All-in-One’ plan, a dedicated Customer Account Manager, and the following perks:

Search result options: Create custom listing arrangements for search results according to your preferences.

Product bundles: Use AI to recommend product bundles that generate a higher purchase value

Advanced cross-selling: Suggest additional products to customers who have already completed a purchase

Advanced reports: Generate advanced conversion and inventory reports using more than 30 data points, including traffic sources, orders, addresses, sales channels, campaigns, and more.

Advanced integrations: These are available via the ikas App Store. Advanced integrations include Etsy, MailChimp, and Klaviyo.

ikas Pros and Cons

No ikas review would be complete without a quick pro-cons list:

Pros 👍
Cons 👎

Pros 👍

You can sell physical and digital products and, on some plans, in-store products.
You get lots of features for your money, even on the Starter plan
There are no limits to how many products you can sell
Omnichannel selling is easy
ikas’s templates (albeit a small list) are customizable, code-free, and attractive.
There’s a 7-day free trial.
You benefit from unlimited web space and website traffic.

Cons 👎

ikas’s website is light on information and self-help resources.
There’s a bit of a learning curve

Reviews and Support

As previously stated, ikas offers free support across all its plans, accessible via phone, and email. In addition, ikas users receive a free one-hour onboarding session with a member of the ikas customer care team.

However, self-help resources are almost non-existent; no video tutorials or guides exist. That said, there’s a blog with posts organized into categories, including Digital Commerce, E-Commerce, Entrepreneurship, and Social Media.

Plus, each feature page offers an FAQ section, which helps address common questions.

As for user reviews, I headed to a range of review platforms to see what people are saying about ikas:

G2 reviewers give ikas an overall rating of 4.4 out of five stars. Users praise that there aren’t any hidden fees, ikas’s speed, and its multilingual capabilities.

However, reviewers were less optimistic about the limited number of integrations and ikas’s prices.

Elsewhere, Capterra users give ikas a resounding 4.8 stars out of 5, liking its 365 days, 8am-10pm customer support, ease of use, and ikas’s wide range of features.

The negatives primarily revolve around the limited choice of templates and “lack of website management customization.”

Half Time Summary

Ding-ding! We’re halfway through my ikas review.

To summarize, ikas is a good contender for anyone looking for an alternative eCommerce platform to some of the bigger players like Shopify, WooCommerce, and Wix.

Its lowest-paid plan offers a good range of features and a seven-day free trial.

That said, template options and integrations are limited. Also, as there’s a lack of self-help resources, newbies may find ikas’s learning curve steeper than competing platforms like Wix or Shopify.

However, although ikas’s templates lack in number, the 16 available are attractive, code-free, and easily customizable, allowing you to create a beautiful storefront.

In addition, its dashboard is relatively easy to navigate, and I like that you can manage your eCommerce store, marketplace, and in-person sales in one place.

ikas User Guide

Moving on to the second half of my ikas review. I decided to try ikas to see if its assertion that you can set up “your very own online store” in “just three simple steps” was accurate.

These three steps are as follows:

Design your eCommerce website

Upload products to your website

Complete your eCommerce website

Obviously, you need to perform several additional actions within each step, not least setting up an account first!

ikas’s pricing page also states, “Setting up an ikas shop usually takes 1 to 3 days. The required duration depends on the number of products and the selected package.”

With that in mind, let’s take a look:

Setting up an Account

This part was easy. From ikas’s home page, click the “Start Free Trial” button and type in your:

First name

Last name

Store name

Email address

Phone number

Create a password

After which, click the purple “Create My Trial Store” button. ikas then asks a few more supplementary questions about the type of store you want to create (but you can skip these for now).

Then it’s straight to the ikas dashboard (as pictured below):

The left-side menu allows you to access all aspects of setting up and managing your store. Alternatively, you can click the purple store icon at the bottom of the left-side menu just above the “settings” icon.

Now, you need to complete the remaining four steps pictured above (the last being – make a sale!). So, with that said, let’s explore how to do that:

Add First Product/Import

Click the “Import” button on your dashboard. You’re then taken to a page where you can import products via CSV and XLSX files.

Alternatively, you can add products by clicking the “Add a Product button.” This populates two options: ‘Simple Product’ (i.e., you can add a product as a single item) or ‘Variant Product’ (i.e., you can add multiple products with different attributes, such as size and color).

In each instance, you’re taken to a page where you can add the necessary product information, including product title and type, price, image and/or video, description, SEO, and more.

Once done, you can move on to the next step.

Choose Your Theme and Edit Your Website

From your dashboard’s homepage, select the “Choose Your Theme and Edit” bar.

You’ll be taken to a theme customization page. Here, ikas shows a theme that might suit your store. If you don’t like it, click the “Add Theme” button to see the complete list of themes ikas offers.

Select a theme you like. You’ll then be asked to give the theme a name. Click “save,” and the theme will be installed and saved on your dashboard, from which you can start customizing it.

From the dashboard, click the “Customize the Theme” button.

You’re then taken to the editor. From the left-side toolbar, you can select various customization options, including editing the following:

Add text

Footers

Headers

Product slider

Email address

Banner

…And more.

You’ll also see an SEO button at the top right of the left-side menu. Click that to add SEO titles and descriptions. With each action you perform, remember to click the purple “Save” button in the top left-hand corner.

Once you’ve edited your themes and are happy with them, you can return to your dashboard homepage.

To access your themes at any time, click on your store icon in the left-hand menu of your dashboard and then click on “My Themes”.

Configure Payment Settings

Click the “Configure Payment Settings” bar from your dashboard’s homepage.

Then, click the “Add Payment Method” button.

You can then add the payment methods you wish to offer customers. You can choose from the following:

PayPal

Stripe

Payment on delivery (cash)

Pay on delivery (credit card)

EFT

Mollie

United Payment TR

Payriff AZ

Paratika TR

Sipay TR

Klarna

Apcopay MALTA

Param

Please update the image, wedon’t have adyen anymore

In each instance, click on the payment method(s) you plan to offer. You’re then taken to a page to connect your account with your preferred payment gateway with your ikas account (as illustrated in the screenshot below). In this instance, we selected Stripe:

Other Settings Worth Noting

In addition to the core steps listed above, you’ll likely need to do a few other things to get your store up and running.

Although these steps aren’t included in ikas’s quick guide on your dashboard’s homepage, you’ll still likely need to complete the following:

Customer Settings

From your dashboard’s homepage, select the “Choose Your Theme and Edit” bar.

From the left-side menu, click “Customer Settings.”

From here, you can edit your checkout page settings. For example, you can specify what customers have to fill out on your checkout page and make specific fields mandatory, such as inputting a contact mobile number or their postcode.

On this page, you can also offer customers the choice to:

Have their order gift packaged

Add a coupon code

Checkout as a guest

Accept your terms and conditions

Set up Shipping Settings

Again, select the “Choose Your Theme and Edit” bar from your dashboard’s homepage.

From the left-side menu, click “Shipping Settings.” Here, you can add your stock locations. You can also customize your “Shipping Rules”. This includes:

Which countries you will ship from

Which delivery methods you’ll offer (either standard shipping or fast delivery

Shipping rules (For example, automatically offering free delivery after a customer spends over a set amount. Or setting paid delivery if the customer spends less than the limit you’ve set)

Once you’ve created your shipping rules, they’re visible on the main shipping page of your dashboard.

You can also manage customer returns by configuring your “Return Settings”. Click “Edit Refund Settings” to create rules for accepting returns.

Automations

Again, select the “Choose Your Theme and Edit” bar from your dashboard’s homepage.

From the left-side menu, click on “Automations.” From here, you can set up your:

Abandoned cart settings: To re-engage with shoppers via email when they leave their checkout before completing the payment/

Back-in-stock alerts: Notify customers by email when their desired product is back in stock.

Product reviews: Email customers post-purchase to ask them to evaluate your products

Money transfer reminders: Email customers to remind them to settle their unpaid orders

Notifications

You guessed it: from your dashboard’s homepage, select the “Choose Your Theme and Edit” bar.

Then, from the left-side menu, select “Notifications.”

From here, you can customize all your email settings and notifications:

Starting with Email Settings:

Click on “Edit Email Settings,” there, you can add the email addresses to which order and return requests are sent. You can also select your language preference (English, Turkish, or German).

Click “Save” once done.

Returning to the “Notifications” page (illustrated above), you can customize emails with your own branding and content when sending customers notifications relating to:

Orders

Shipment

Refunds

Customers

Automations

(Within each of the above categories, you’ll see a list of all the various emails you can send to customers)

For example, under orders, there are ten different types of emails you can customize and send to customers, including:

Order canceled

Order created

Order delivered

Payment approved

…And so on.

With Shipping notifications, there are three email drafts you can customize:

Order ready for shipment

Order fulfilled

Order tracking information

With refund notifications, there are four email drafts you can customize:

Order refunded

Order refund request

Order refund request approved

Order refund request rejected

With customer notifications, there are two email drafts you can customize:

Reset password

The customer’s welcome message when they create an account

With automations, there are four email drafts you can customize:

Abandoned checkout

Customer review

Product back in stock reminder

Money transfer reminder

All you need to do is click on the edit icon for the email type you’re interested in. You’ll be taken to the customization page for that email.

From here, you can customize the emails, as shown in the example below:

Once you’ve finished customizing your email, click the purple “Save” button at the top right corner of the screen.

Manage Settings

From your dashboard’s homepage, click the “Settings” icon at the bottom of the left-hand menu.

This takes you to what’s essentially your store’s back office. From this page, you can edit the following:

Merchant Settings: You can edit settings your store’s settings, including your address, preferred currency, and time zone, and define order number and currency formatting rules.

Stock Locations: You can define multiple stock locations. Your price plan, however, limits you to the number of locations it allows.

Tax Settings: You can define country-based tax rates and specify whether product pages include or exclude taxes.

Filters and Search: Among other settings, customize the filters customers see on your online store’s search function.

Staff Members: When you add new staff members to your store, you can assign different permissions to these accounts.

Store Activity History: View and filter the actions performed by staff members or applications.

Shipping Template: Customize your shipping label’s information and paper size.

Languages and Translations: You can add a new language to your store and perform bulk or individual translations for said language.

Customer Attributes: Customize the fields used in your registration form to gather more customer information.

Email Domain Settings: Use your own domain to increase email deliverability.

Store Transfer Settings: Import your customers and products from other platforms like Wix.

Managing Orders

All order management can be done from the left-side toolbar on your dashboard’s homepage. Just click “Orders.”

From here, you can submit orders, collect payments, and check the status of your orders.

Under the “Orders” tab, you’ll see a sub-menu listing the following options:

Drafts

Abandoned Cart

Tags: Create order tags to help you manage orders; for example, mark orders as urgent

Managing Customers

From the left-sidebar on your dashboard’s homepage, click “Customers.”

Here, you can manage all of your customers’ information, including their name, address, email contact details, phone number, and order history. Customers will automatically appear here when they have ordered from your store.

You can also add customers by either clicking:

Import: (Add customers via a CSV or XLSX file)

Add New Customer: (Manually add the aforementioned customer details for individual customers).

In addition, you can add and manage customer groups. These are great for targeting specific customers with tailored marketing campaigns, sending bulk emails, and running more granular reports:

Under the “Customers” tab on the left-side menu, click “Customer Groups.”

Click on the purple “Add Customer Group” button. You can then perform one of two actions:

Manually add customers to a group.

Create a dynamic customer group by automatically grouping customers who meet specific criteria (e.g., their preferred language, their spending limit, and so on).

Blog

Last but not least, you can also add a blog to your eCommerce store.

From your dashboard’s homepage, select the “Choose Your Theme and Edit” bar.

Click the “Blog” button at the bottom of the left-side bar.

Select the purple “New Blog post” button. From here, you’re taken to a page where you can add your post’s content and your:

Blog title

A short description of the blog post

Image

Author name

Category

Tag

Language

SEO titles and descriptions

Once done, click “Save.”

Extensions

To add the extensions mentioned above (Google Analytics et al.), click “Extensions” in the left-side menu of your dashboard. You can add any or all of the extensions to your store.

Install Apps and Sales Channels

From the left side toolbar of your dashboard’s homepage, click “App Store.” You’ll see the apps we referred to earlier that ikas integrates with. Each has an “install” button.

Alternatively, to integrate with other sales channels, return to the left toolbar of your dashboard’s homepage and click on the + next to “Sales Channels.” You can then add the following:

POS (point of sale) for your physical store

B2B Wholesale (Online) Store: Set unique prices for customers or customer groups and allow only authorized users to see your products or prices.

ikas Review: My Final Thoughts

That brings us to the end of my ikas review! Hopefully, my ikas review has provided plenty of food for thought about ikasIkas’s offerings, prices, features, and, importantly, how it works.

Although ikasIkas is less well-known, it offers subscribers many features, even on its cheapest plan.

In addition, the dashboard is easy to navigate, and ikas’s themes are attractive and straightforward to customize with no coding experience needed.

The users generally praise the platform on review sites, and it’s certainly positive that there are no hidden fees.

So, can you really set up your own online ikas store in “just three simple steps?” In theory, yes.

But in practice, as our guide has just demonstrated, you’ll likely have to go through several more hoops to get up and running.

Where it falls is its lack of information, particularly since there are no instructions or videos that walk you through your store setup, which may be a deal breaker for newbies.

On the other hand, you do get a one-to-one hour-long onboarding session when you sign up.

As with all our reviews, I recommend using the 7-day free trial before committing your hard-earned cash. This is the best way to see whether this platform is right for your business.

Are you considering joining the 6,000+ businesses already using ikas? Let us know what you think in the comments below!

The post ikas Review and Step-by-Step Tutorial for 2024 appeared first on Ecommerce Platforms.

Original Source: https://www.creativebloq.com/advice/how-much-to-build-a-website

Setting up a website for your business? We take a no-nonsense look at what you can expect to pay to build a website.

Original Source: https://smashingmagazine.com/2024/03/developers-strengthen-mental-health/

I have had my fair share of projects that have given me life because of what I accomplished, as well as those that have cost me life when I reflect on the terrible stress they caused. I know I’m not unique that way; sometimes, my work makes me feel like a rock star and other times, I question whether I should be a developer at all. Some projects test you — like really test you.

In the first week of December 2023, I got a contract to rebuild an entire web app from the ground-up using a new technology designed to be launched alongside a “new year, new system” initiative heading into 2024.

I think you know where this is going. I built up a lot of confidence heading into the project but soon found that I had bitten off way more than I could chew. The legacy code I inherited was the epitome of “legacy” code, and its spaghetti nature needed more than one developer to suss out. The project looked doomed from the beginning, and I hadn’t even written a line of code!

I quit the job. After weeks of stress-laden sleep, I simply couldn’t stomach the work. I actually dreaded work altogether. And with that dread came doubts about my career and whether I should start looking outside the industry.

Is this starting to sound familiar?

That job wasn’t just a project that posed a personal challenge; no, it was a battle for my mental health. I was officially burned out. Thankfully, I was relieved of some pressure when, to my surprise, the client was weirdly understanding and offered to bring in an additional developer to share the load. That really helped, and it gave me what I needed to roll my sleeves back up and finish the job.

Is This Success?

The project launched, and the client was happy with it. But I still experience aftershocks, even today, where the trauma from that contract seeps back in and reminds me just how awful it was and the extent to which it made me question my entire career.

So, even though the project was ultimately a success, I wouldn’t say it was “successful.” There was a real non-monetary cost that I paid just for taking the job.

I’m sure it is the same for you. We’ve all had stressful projects that push us to the brink of what feels like self-destruction. It’s clear because there are so many other articles and blog posts about it, all offering insightful personal advice for relieving stress, like exercise, sleep, and eating right.

In fact, as I reflected back on projects that predated this one particular nightmare, I realized there had been other projects I’d taken that had likely contributed to the burnout. Interestingly, I found a few common threads between them that I now use as “warning flags” going into new work.

All of our experiences are unique to us, and there is no standard recipe for managing stress and protecting your mental health. Advice in this area is always best described as “your mileage may vary” for no other reason than that it is scoped to a specific individual. True, one’s experiences can go so far as to help someone through a tough situation. I find it’s the same thing with self-help books — the best advice is usually the same advice found elsewhere, only articulated better or in a way that resonates with you.

Think of this article as more of my personal story of experiences safeguarding my mental health when finding myself in super specific work situations.

The Urgent Hotfix

Remember that project with the “comfortable” deadline? Yeah, me neither. It’s that common thing where you ask when the project needs to be completed, and you get back a sarcastic “last Tuesday.”

In this particular instance, it was a usual Monday morning. There I was, still in bed, happily rested after a fulfilling weekend. Then Slack started blasting me with notifications, all of which were in the vein of,

“Hey, users can’t make payments on the app — urgent!”

You can fault me for having Slack notifications enabled early on a Monday. But still, it killed my good mood and practically erased whatever respite I gained from the weekend. But I got up, headed over to the laptop, and began working as quickly as the day had started.

The timeline for this sort of fix is most definitely a “due last Tuesday” situation. It’s urgent and demands immediate attention at the expense of dropping everything else. There’s nothing easygoing about it. The pressure is on. As we were all trying to fix the bug, the customer support team also added to the pressure by frequently reporting the rising number of users having difficulties processing payments.

We read through this huge codebase and ran different kinds of tests, but nothing worked. I think it was around 40 minutes before the deadline that a colleague came across a Reddit post (dated six years ago or so) that had the solution in it. I tell you, that bug stood no chance. We finally got the payment system up and running. I was relieved, but at what cost?

What I Learned About HotFixes

Urgent hotfixes are a reality for most developers I know. They sort of come with the territory. But allowing them to take away your well-earned peace of mind is all too easy. A day can go from peaceful to panicking with just one Slack notification, and it may happen at any time, even first thing on a Monday morning.

What I’d Do Differently

It’s funny how Slack is called “Slack” because it really does feel like “slacking off” when you’re not checking in. But I can tell you that my Slack notifications are now paused until more reasonable hours.

Yes, it was a very real and very urgent situation, but allowing it to pull me completely out of my personal time wasn’t the best choice. I am not the only person on the team, so someone else who is already readily available can take the call.

After all, a rested developer is a productive developer, especially when faced with an urgent situation.

The Pit Of Procrastination

I once got myself into a contract for a project that was way above my skill set. But what’s that thing developers love saying, “Fake it ’til you make it,” or something like that? It’s hard to say “no” to something, particularly if your living depends on winning project bids. Plus, I won’t lie: there’s a little pride in not wanting to admit defeat.

When I accepted the job, I convinced myself that all I needed was two full days of steady focus and dedication to get up to speed and knock things out. But guess what? I procrastinated.

It actually started out very innocently. I’d give myself a brain break and read for 30 minutes, then maybe scroll through socials, then switch to YouTube, followed by… you get the picture. By the time I realize what happened, I’m several hours off schedule and find stress starting to harbor and swell inside me.

Those half hours here and there took me right up to the eleventh hour.

Unfortunately, I lost the contract as I couldn’t hit my promised timeline. I take full responsibility for that, of course, but I want to be honest and illustrate the real consequences that happen when stress and fear take over. I let myself get distracted because I was essentially afraid of the project and wasn’t being honest with myself.

What I Learned About Procrastination

The “fake it ’til you make it” ethos is a farce. There are relatively “safe” situations where getting into unfamiliar territory outside your skillset is going to be just fine. However, a new client with a new project spending new money on my expertise is not one of them.

Saying “yes” to a project is a promise, not a gamble.

And I’m no longer gambling with my client’s projects.

What I’d Do Differently

Learning on the job without a solid plan is a bad idea. If a project screams “out of my league,” I’ll politely decline. In fact, I have found that referring a client to another developer with the right skill set is actually a benefit because the client appreciates the honesty and convenience of not having to find another lead. I actually get more work when I push away the work I’m least suited for.

The Unrealistic Request

This happened recently at a startup I volunteered for and is actually quite funny in hindsight. Slack chimed in with a direct message from a marketing lead on the team:

“Hi, we are gonna need to add an urgent feature for a current social media trend. Can you implement it ASAP?”

It was a great feature! I dare say I was even eager to work on it because I saw its potential for attracting new users to the platform. Just one problem: what exactly does “ASAP” mean in this instance? Yes, I know it’s “as soon as possible,” but what is the actual deadline, and what’s driving it? Are we talking one day? One week? One month? Again, startups are famous for wanting everything done two weeks ago.

But I didn’t ask those questions. I dropped everything I was doing and completed the feature in two weeks’ time. If I’m being honest, there was also an underlying fear of saying “no” to the request. I didn’t want to disappoint someone on my team.

That’s the funny part. “ASAP” was really code for “as soon as possible with your current workload.” Was that communicated well? Definitely not. Slack isn’t exactly the best medium for detailed planning. I had a lot more time than I thought, yet I let myself get swept up by the moment. Sure, I nailed the new feature, and it did indeed attract new users — but again, at what cost? I patted myself on the back for a job well done but then swiveled my chair around to realize that I was facing a pile of work that I let mount up in the meantime.

And thus, the familiar weight of stress began taking its typical toll.

What I Learned About Unrealistic Requests

Everything has a priority. Someone else may have a pressing deadline, but does it supersede your own priorities? Managing priorities is more of a juggling act, but I was treating them as optional tasks that I could start and stop at will.

What I’d Do Differently

There are two things I’d do differently next time an unrealistic request comes up:

First, I’ll be sure to get a firm idea of when the request is actually needed and compare it to my existing priorities before agreeing to it.
Second, I plan on saying “no” without actually saying it. How different would the situation have been had I simply replied, “Yes, if…” instead, as in, “Yes, if I can complete this thing I’m working on first, then I’d be happy to jump on that next.” That puts the onus on the requester to do a little project management rather than allowing myself to take on the burden carte blanche.

The 48-Hour Workday

How many times have you pulled an all-nighter to get something done? If the answer is zero, that’s awesome. In my experience, though, it’s come up more times than I can count on two hands. Sometimes it’s completely my doing; I’ll get sucked into a personal side project or an interesting bug that leads to hours passing by like minutes.

I have more than a few friends and acquaintances who wear sleepless nights like merit badges as if accumulating them is somehow a desirable thing.

The most recent example for me was a project building a game. It was supposed to be pretty simple: You’re a white ball chasing red balls that are flying around the screen. That might not be the most exciting thing in the world, but it was introducing me to some new coding concepts, and I started riding a wave I didn’t want to leave. In my head, this little game could be the next Candy Crush, and there was no way I’d risk losing success by quitting at 2:00 a.m. No way.

To this day, the game is sitting dormant and collecting digital dust in a GitHub repository, unfinished and unreleased. I’m not convinced the five-day marathon was worth it. If anything, it’s like I had spent my enthusiasm for the job all at once, and when it burned me out, I needed a marathon stretch of sleep to get back to reality.

What I Learned About All-Nighters

The romanticized image of a fast-typing developer sporting a black hoodie in a dark room of servers and screens only exists in movies and is not something to emulate. There’s a reason there are 24 hours in a day instead of 48 — we need breaks and rest, if for nothing else, to be better at what we do. Mimicking a fictional stereotype is not the path to becoming a good developer, nor is it the path to sustainable living conditions.

What I’d Do Differently

I’m definitely more protective of the boundaries between me and my work. There’s a time to work, just as there’s a time for resting, personal needs, and even a time for playing.

That means I have clearly defined working hours and respect them. Naturally, there are days I need to be adaptable, but having the boundaries in place makes those days the exception as opposed to the rule.

I also identify milestones in my work that serve as natural pauses to break things up into more manageable pieces. If I find myself coding past my regular working hours, especially on consecutive days, then that’s an indication that I am taking on too much, that I am going outside of scope, or that the scope hasn’t been defined at all and needs more definition.

Bugged By A Bug

There are no escaping bugs. As developers, we’re going to make mistakes and clean them up as we go. I won’t say I enjoy bugfixes as much as developing new features, but there is some little part of me at the same time that’s like, “Oh yeah, challenge accepted!” Bugs can often be approached as mini puzzles, but that’s not such a bad thing.

But there are those bugs that never seem to die. You know, the kind you can’t let go of? You’re absolutely sure that you’ve done everything correctly, and yet, the bug persists. It nearly gets to the point where you might be tempted to blame the bug on the browser or whatever dependency you’re working with, but you know it’s not. It sticks with you at night as you go to bed.

Then comes the epiphany: Oh crap, it’s a missing X. And X is usually a missing semicolon or anything else that’s the equivalent of unplugging the thing and plugging it back in only to find things are working perfectly.

I have lots of stories like this. This one time, however, takes the cake. I was working on this mobile app with React Native and Expo. Everything was going smoothly, and I was in the zone! Then, a rendering error cropped up for no clear reason. My code compiled, and all the tests passed, but the app refused to render on my mobile device.

So, like any logical developer, I CTRL + Z’d my way back in time until I reached a point where I was sure that the app rendered as expected. I still got the same rendering error.

That was when I knew this bug was out for my blood. I tried every trick I knew in the book to squash that thing, but it simply would not go away. I was removing and installing packages like a madman, updating dependencies, restarting VS Code, pouring through documentation, and rebooting my laptop. Still nothing.

For context: Developers typically use Expo on their devices to render the apps in real-time when working with React Native and Expo. I was not, and therein lies the problem. My phone had decided to ditch the same Wi-Fi network that my laptop was connected to.

All I had to do was reconnect my phone to the network. Problem solved. But agony in the process.

What I Learned About Bugfixes

Not every code bug has a code solution. Even though I had produced perfectly valid scripts, I doubted my work and tackled the issue with what’s natural to me: code.

If I had stepped back from my work for even a moment, then I probably would have seen the issue and saved myself many hours and headaches. I let my frustration take over to the extent that the bug was no longer a mini puzzle but the bane of my existence. I really needed to read my temperature level and know when to take a break.

Bugs sometimes make me doubt my credibility as a developer, especially when the solution is both simple and right under my nose the entire time — like network connectivity.

What I’d Do Differently

There’s an old Yiddish saying: To a worm in horseradish, the world is horseradish. You may recognize it as the leading quote in Malcolm Gladwell’s What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures. It’s closely related to other common sayings along the lines of, “To a hammer, everything is a nail.”

In addition to trying to look at bugs from a non-horseradish perspective, I now know to watch my frustration level when things start feeling helpless. Take breaks. Take a walk. Eat lunch. Anything to break the cycle of rumination. It’s often in that moment of clarity that the puzzle finally starts to come together.

The Meeting-Working Imbalance

I don’t like meetings, and I’m sure many developers would agree with me on that. They’re somewhat of a necessary evil right? There’s value, for example, in the weekly standups for checking in on the team’s progress and staying on the same page as far as what’s coming up in the following week of planning.

If only that was the one single meeting I had to attend on a given day.

Let me describe one particular day that I feel is emblematic of what I think is a common conflict between time spent in meetings and time spent working. I got to my workspace and was ready for the usual half-hour weekly team check-in. It went a little over, which was fine, but it did mean I had to rush to the next meeting instead of having a little buffer between the two. That meeting was a classic one, the type where everyone wants a developer in the room in case something technical comes up but never does, leaving me bored and dividing my attention with my actual work.

We had five meetings that day. In my book, that’s a full day completely wasted because I was unable to get around to writing any code at all, save for a few lines I could squeeze in here and there. That’s no way to work, but is unfortunately a common pattern.

What I Learned About Meetings

Meetings have to happen. I get that. But I’ve learned that not every meeting is one that I personally need to attend. In many cases, I can get the gist of what happened in a meeting by watching the recording or reading the project manager’s notes. I now know that meetings can “happen” in lots of ways, and what comes from them can still be learned asynchronously in many instances.

What I’d Do Differently

From here on out, I am asking (politely, of course) whether my attendance is mandatory or not when certain meetings come up. I also ask if I can either prepare something for the group in advance or get caught up to speed after the meeting has happened.

Conclusion

That’s it! These are a handful of situations I have found myself in the past couple of years. It’s funny how seemingly small events are able to coalesce and reveal patterns of behavior. There’s a common thread of stubbornness running through them that has opened my eyes to the way I work and how I manage my mental health.

I’m sure it is the same for you. What times can you remember when stress, anxiety, and frustration consumed you? Are you able to write them down? Do you see a pattern forming? I believe doing this sort of mental inventory is valuable because you start to see specific things that trigger your feelings, and with that, it’s possible to recognize and avoid them in the future.

Further Reading On SmashingMag

“A Simple But Effective Mental Health Routine For Programmers,” Dave Oscar
“It’s Good To Talk: Thoughts And Feelings On Creative Wellness,” Jhey Tompkins
“How To Increase Workflow And Reduce Stress With Nature Sounds,” Scott McGregor
“Dealing With Loud And Silent Burnout,” Alexander Charchar
“Mental Health: Let’s Talk About It,” Christopher Murphy

Original Source: https://www.creativebloq.com/news/apple-tv-unreal-engine-5-max-beyond

CG film Max Beyond is bold and different.