January Overview

January is a great month since it's beginning of the year I tend to reflect on my actions and growth.

I want to mention some of the things I did this month so far in category, work projects, personal projects etc.

Work Projects

ETL Project Enhancement

In the first 2 weeks of the month I wrapped up a project I was working in December before the holidays, it was extremely challenging and I'm proud it has been running several days in production without errors. I cannot share all details, but it's a ETL project Extract Transform and Load. Extract was made with web crawling techniques including managing secrets, them transforming the data to collect insights and displaying them in a dashboard. The project has been running for a few months with a single source of data, the work was more related to introducing a new source of data and adapting the system to support that and maybe more sources in the future. It's a nodejs project I bootstrapped for this client 3 years ago.

Web Performance Optimization

Worked improving the web vitals, improving page load, removing clutter, it's a remixjs projects hosted on vercel, using responsive images with srcSet, lazy loading third-parties, introduced sitemap, removed old non-relevant urls. I'm mainly using google search engine but I'm trying to get access to something like href or semrush to help of another layer of metrics to improve the website SEO moving forward. I'm using Cloudflare Images in this project, it's fairly good, right now my challenge is to convince the team that a third-party is causing a Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) and improving it can lead to better indexing, it's a cross-team agreement before I take action, the fix is easy but communication and understanding is the most important aspect here.

Crypto Payment Integration

I also evaluated how I could use coinbase commerce to begin collecting payments for one of my clients. I'm super excited about this project because the crypto ecosystem in general seem to be a very fertile soil, coinbase commerce is specially interesting because of its API integration that in many ways remind me the easy of integration from Stripe, I think that was their goal after all.

Legacy React App Revival

This month I was the first month I begin the process to re-boot a react application that was dormant for 1 and a half year. It's challenging to manage dependencies, but it has been a doable exercise of patience and good decision making to save up time, avoiding being stuck in problem that won't bring us closer to the goal, and hopefully the project will easier to maintain moving forward, and I'm also working with a new team here and I'm excited to be exposed to react-native again.

Personal Projects

TBBC.app Platform

Well you are basically at my personal project, tbbc.app is my second biggest personal website ever it's a nodejs project with many frontends and I love hacking around here when I make some free time.

Activity Track Web App

One of the highlights, was the Activity Track webapp, bootstrapped entirely with Cursor AI. I didn't write a proper blog post about it, I should do it to get in more details, in summary it's a offline first activity-track application mimicking github activity chart, you can install it in your phone, all data is stored with indexed db, and it has been working very well it has 300+ visits in january. I want to make it possible to sync the activities across devices and maybe even add notifications to remind me to save my daily activities.

Char Explorer Updates

Another personal project I did a bit of a redesign while testing Windsurf AI is the Char Explorer, add keyboard navigation, better urls, share functionality and other smaller details, it's looking pretty nice go check it out.

Payment Integration Experiments

I've been into paywalls, in december I built a ethereum paywall in the base network, and this month I built another paywall with abacate pay which support PIX the most popular instant payment method in Brazil. I'm looking into adapting my legal entity to be able to capture these payments with abacate pay in my website, I want to be able to offer digital products within my web explorations.

User Authentication System

Email verification, after fighting against cookies and accounts within the tbbc.app website, I finally understood I must provide a way to allow people to store their data cross devices and by verifying a OTP via email is the easiest and broadest method worldwide these days. In january I built a email verification section with suing email provider loops, most email are going to span right now but since it's a pet side project I don't think it matter a lot, I'm proud from now one people will have a way to validate their session thus allowing me to explore different web experiences that rely in some kind of authenticated session.

Community Engagement

This month I organized another monthly frontend meetup in my city, 15 people attended and it's energising to meet people from different backgrounds.

Whatsapp Web Chrome Extension Hack

I also created a chrome extension that integrates with whatsapp web, a quick solution for a family member, check it out in this blog post

Insights

Reading through this blog post I feel like I've done way too much, initially I thought if I wrote a blog post like this every month there will be months I would have nothing interesting to write about, and I think that's just not the case.

I could maybe work on less side projects I had 3 just in january, and I have many ideas to explore and personally I feel overwhelmed with ideas and I need to constantly remind myself I'm good enough without them.

Moving into February I believe there'll be less side projects as I'm kind of overloaded of work now, but let's see what the future reserve!