This summer, Osio Labs launched Hey Node, our new training site for Node.js. Jon Church (@jonchurch) teaches the tutorials. His experience writing and researching Node.js, and his endless curiosity, fit so well with how we create and structure tutorials.
Our tutorials are aimed at JavaScript developers -- with some experience using Node -- who want to dive deeper. Like Drupalize.Me, some tutorials are free while the full course is behind a moderately-priced paywall that, until we have a critical mass of tutorials, is priced even lower.
Hey Node didn’t arise just from me or any single member of my team. At our 2017 company retreat, we had a long conversation about our personal and business goals for the next five years. We decided we wanted to grow the company -- but in a deliberate and meaningful way. We also wanted to be mindful about taking our most formative lessons from Drupalize.Me, and applying them to our next project. It took us another year of research to decide to work with the Node community and build Hey Node.
Our biggest lesson
One of the most important lessons we’ve learned from Drupalize.Me concerns customer feedback. We’ve learned how making it easier for customers to talk to us improves our product. Our content stays much more accurate because customers find all of the tiny details that change regularly in moving software like Drupal. Once they tell us, we can update our site right away instead of waiting for a periodic review.
Customer feedback has also shaped our content. We’ve created new guides and tutorials in direct response to customer requests. Also, the fact that we now have written tutorials in addition to video was definitely done in response to customers who struggled with the video-only format, especially for code tutorials. No doubt we’ll always have more to learn on that front, but I think the importance of prioritizing it has been driven home over and over again.
We hope starting out with a better understanding of customer feedback fuels faster iteration and improvement with Hey Node. We’ve already set up processes and tools to facilitate better customer communication and we’re in a good place to act on that feedback more rapidly. We will never forget that our customers know what our product should be better than we do.
We’re already planning our next retreat to talk about what the future holds for us, but also to celebrate the Hey Node launch. We can hardly believe we finally made it happen -- and we’re long overdue for some in-person high-fives, and sharing a few tubs of ice cream.