Marco Heine_

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Web Developer Diary 01

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an open notebook

With this blog post, I’ll start a new series: the Web Developer Diary series!

I saw this idea on Dave Ruperts blog Opens in new tab. He calls it vibe check and it’s a check-in at the end of every month, to reflect on things that happened during this month - work-whise and in private.

I really like this format, because I do a monthly reflection on things anyway with my “Ein guter Plan” planner (https://einguterplan.de/ Opens in new tab) (sorry, only available in german!).

So without any further ado, let’s start this Web Developer Diary series and see what happened in May 2022!

Work

I started freelancing back in february with one of the biggest projects I’ve ever worked on and this month was the time of adding the final touches and preparing everything for the big launch. It’s a NextJS static-generated website where we used Prismic as headless CMS and vercel for deployment and hosting. This combination is genuinely so much fun to work with. The site is predominantly static generated content, but the amount of content is A LOT.

I wasn’t sure how user-friendly Prismic is with a ton of documents and custom types and if we would lose track immediately. But turns out: their filter and search functionality is actually great. All the people who were adding content into the CMS were pretty happy with it, which makes me confident in using Prismic for bigger projects in the future again.

Besides all the static pages this project also included a lot of interactive parts, which made the development challenging and very exciting. That included the possiblity of filtering and sorting items, a pretty cool interactive map, and a powerful search based on algolia Opens in new tab. Implementing a search with algolia was very intuitive and rewarding. It’s the first time I used it and I can highly recommand it.

Besides this big project I also worked on some smaller projects, using the tech stack mentioned above.

For the first time ever I did some client outreach by myself. This means reasearching companies who have bad websites or no website at all and contacting them with reasons why a great website will benefit them. I took away three key learnings from that:

  • A lot of companies still do not have a website and have only a facebook or an instagram page and this really shocks me
  • A lof of companies still have really bad websites. Using outdated jQuery versions, 10s loading times or more, not accessible at all and just looking terrible
  • It’s really motivational to tell someone why a good website should be important and a priority to them. That confirms me in why I do what I do and why I like it so much.

Blog posts of the month

Unfortunalety I didn’t find the time to finish a blog post completely this month. But I have some posts in my “almost finished” columns and I’m pretty excited to publish them in the next weeks.

I’ve already learned so much in this first few months of freelancing, I could spend a whole week of just writing down everything I learned and turning that into blog posts. I hope this web developer diary will bring me back into writing blog posts regularly again!

TIL posts of the month

I did find the time to add some new Today-I-Learned posts this month, which makes me really happy.

I also played around a bit with my Today-I-learned page, added some nice animations and the coolest part: a search functionality! It’s basically just a client-side filter which checks several parts of the posts with .includes() but it works pretty well and I use it a lot!

Stay tuned for more Today-I-learned posts in the next weeks, my draft folder gets bigger and bigger.

Everything else than web dev

đŸ‹đŸ»â€â™‚ïž Fitness & Health

Concerning working out this month was quite a good one. I managed to close my rings on my apple watch on 22 days. I missed my standing goal only on 2 days which makes me very happy.

screenshot of closed apple watch rings

I managed to fit in one, or two workouts every week. My current workout routine consists of

  • 3 sets of pullups alternating with 3 sets of pistol squats
  • 3 sets of pushups alternating with 3 sets of ring dips
  • and 3 sets of arching active hang

The last one is my progression path to achieving the front lever one day.

Besides bodyweight exercises I rode my bike a lot and I already can feel how I get fitter. It's a Focus Atlas 6.7 gravel bike and it was one of the best things I got myself this year. For me it's the perfect combination between mountain biking and riding fast and I'm having a lot of fun.

📚 Reading

I finished two books this month:

I liked them both a lot. The latter even made me shed a few tears.

I also started a new book, it’s Postcards Opens in new tab by Annie Proulx and I’m really excited about it. It’s the one book who made her win her first award. I loved Shipping news and Accordion Crimes and I’m really interested what this book will be like.

I’m currently at 7 books read this year and my goal are 30. You can follow the progress of my reading challenge Opens in new tab.

đŸ•č Video Games

I bought an Xbox Series S back in march only for one reason: I wanted to play Elden Ring Opens in new tab. And what can I say: I think this is the best game I’ve ever played. The open world is so enjoyable to explore, the boss fights are unique and a lot of fun and I did not have on minute where I regretted buying a new console for the sole purpose of playing one specific game.

If you’re also playing: I’m currently 84h in and level 100.

I’m no expert in the souls games, I just have a lot of fun playing them. I’m really curious on how long it will take me to finish this game.

That’s it for may 2022 in the web developer diaries series. See you next month!

I hope you enjoyed this post and learned something new. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me via Email Opens in new tab.

If you want to support me, you can buy me a coffee. I would be very happy about it!

☕ Buy me a coffee ☕

I wish you a wonderful day! Marco