Welcome to the April 2025 retrospective. This has been a busy month, with new projects and a lot of work on Catalyst. I feel like this is one of the months where I’ve learned the most about subjects I thought I knew better than I did, and that makes me very happy.

Catalyst’s struggles

Last month, I mentioned that I wanted to finish up work on Catalyst. During this month, I’ve been working on the user’s profile page, the timelines the user will see on the homepage, as well as update forms for projects, branches, posts and user settings. All of this has been a struggle, and at points I’ve felt a bit overwhelmed. This led me to think that I should take a break from Catalyst, and focus on other projects. More on that later.

However, in the last few days, I’ve been back on Catalyst and now, finally, I’m happy with the progress I’ve made. I’ve migrated from Drizzle to Prisma, which has made the codebase much cleaner and easier to maintain. Nothing against Drizzle, but I feel much more comfortable using Prisma. I’ve made many of the queries much simpler and efficient, and many of the server actions have been simplified and even compressed where similar. With this renewed focus on Catalyst, I think it’s time to put some finishing touches on the project such as the search bar, do a final pass on the codebase, and call it feature complete.

New projects

As mentioned above, I’ve been working on some new projects.

Gasthaus is a simple Angular frontend for a restaurant offering traditional German Cuisine. The main intention behind the project was to check out Angular. I used to work with Angular quite a bit, but it has been years, and Angular has really improved and changed a lot since then. I’m really happy with how it feels now, and I’m excited to use it in future, more complex projects.

I’ve also been working on an API for my German studies. I’ve also used this smaller project to learn about NestJS and Fastify. It is a simple project with endpoints such as verbs, nouns and adjectives, and it is also a good example of how to use NestJS to create a REST API. I’m still not quite comfortable with NestJS, but I think it’s a great tool for building APIs.

What’s next?

During May I will finish up Catalyst, polish Gasthaus and the German API, and do a codebase check on some of my older projects. I think this will take most of my month, but I’m also looking forward to work on the online movie theater project I mentioned in the March retrospective. I’m excited to see how it turns out, and I hope it’s a good learning experience for me.

Thank you so much for reading, and see you back next month!