Status update - 2021-11

This is a monthly series reporting on how things are going at Console. This post looks at what happened in November.

Focus for November

I wrote last month:

We've slowly been building out more in-depth reviews on our website. This involves exploring a whole category and testing out every tool in each one. So far we have written up detailed reviews of the best tools in 5 categories:

Browser testing, Code collaboration & pair programming, Load testing, Server monitoring, Website monitoring.

Our weekly newsletter is designed to help with discovering things you didn't know you needed. The category reviews are about helping you choose the best tools when you know what problems you want to solve. In November we will continue working on these categories to go even deeper.

So how did we do?

In-depth reviews

As planned, we launched the first set of in-depth reviews for the best browser testing tools category. This involved writing detailed reviews for the best 6 browser testing tools: BrowserStack, LambdaTest, CrossBrowserTesting, Sauce Labs, Ghost Inspector and Selenium.

The idea behind these pages is to help developers who are searching for advice about how to solve a particular problem - browser testing in this case. Our newsletter is great for discovering a broad set of interesting tools, but these reviews go deeper across a specific category.

We'll be continuing to build out these reviews across several categories over the coming months.

Screenshot of the BrowserStack review page.

Podcast Season 2

We just released the trailer for Season 2 of the Console DevTools Podcast. This season will consist of 11 interviews with interesting people working around devtools. The list of episodes is:

• Dev infrastructure, with John Graham-Cumming (Cloudflare)
• Security, with Thomas Ptacek (Fly.io)
• Observability, with Charity Majors (Honeycomb)
• Decentralization, with Brooklyn Zelenka (Fission)
• Devtools investing, with Ed Sim (Boldstart)
• Homomorphic Encryption, with Rand Hindi (Zama)
• Dev communities, with Rosie Sherry (Orbit)
• Web standards & privacy, with Desigan (Dees) Chinniah (Tor / Ex-Mozilla)
• Designing dev products, with Ellen Chisa (Boldstart)
• Terminal tools, with Michelle Lim & Zach Lloyd (Warp)
• Developer experience, with Jean Yang (Akita)

The first episode is out on 6 Jan 2022 and the trailer is available now.

Subscriber growth

We started October with around 11,000 newsletter subscribers and are going into December with over 15,000. We're very happy with the growth of the subscriber-base, which continues to show great engagement even as it grows. Indeed, the top two links in the latest newsletter received 1,500 and 1,100 clicks each.

Even as we cover various categories from commercial to cloud to open source in frontend, backend, devops and data science categories, our goal is that every subscriber should find something of interest at least once per month.

Focus for December

Our main focus in Dec will be finalizing the production of Season 2 of the podcast ready for the first episode to drop on 6 Jan. There's a lot that goes into preparing for the release - audio editing, transcripts, show notes, promo graphics, clips for social media, creating a YouTube version and coordinating everything with the guests.

In the final two weeks of the year, we're also going to change the newsletter format to run a countdown of the top 10 tools of the year. The ranking will be based on which tools received the most clicks across the whole year, adjusted for the recipient numbers for each newsletter. This means the ranking is effectively chosen by our subscribers.