What is this?

As this is the first entry I am writing, let me welcome you and explain what this is all about. Towards the end of each month, I’ll write a short post about what I’ve been doing, what projects I’ve been working on, what I’ve learned, what struggles I’ve had and how and if I’ve overcome them.

Keeping track of what I’ve done, what I’ve learned and what I’m planning to do keeps me motivated, grounded and accountable. It’s easy to feel like you’re not doing enough, or that what you’re focusing on isn’t important, so keeping this kind of ‘diary’ will hopefully help me see how the pieces are piling up.

Expect the writing to be a bit rough around the edges at first, but I will try to improve it as I write more of these blogs. I hope you enjoy reading them and find them useful.

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Documentation, lots of documentation

In December, with the holidays around the corner and a long year of work behind me, I knew I wanted to shift my focus to something a little less strenuous than the constant programming and planning, and I decided to deal with the programming related tasks I had been pushing aside.

Throughout the year, as projects piled up, I neglected to document them properly. In December I changed that, and now all my major projects have proper, detailed documentation.

Now, I’m not an expert at writing documentation, so there’s certainly room for improvement, but I’m happy with the current state of things, and I think any documentation provides enough information to understand the project and get it running.

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Tests… a nightmare, a necessity

Another aspect I had avoided was proper testing. I had done a course on Test-Driven Development earlier in the year, and I know how to write what I would classify as basic unit tests, but I still struggle to implement Test-Driven Development practices into my day-to-day workflow.

In December I tried to remedy this and really tried to write a lot of tests, but certain aspects of it were certainly a struggle for me.

Simply put, I need to dig deeper into the Testing Library and Vitest documentation, and keep writing tons of tests until it clicks. I expect this to be a big part of next month’s review, and hopefully I will have some good news to share with you then.

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What’s next?

Now that I’ve finished most of the documentation, I’ll be turning my attention back to some of my projects.

In particular, Catalyst will be the focus of the next few weeks as I rework its backend to be more flexible and scalable, adjust the API endpoints to be more clearly defined, and adjust the frontend API fetches to be simpler.

Other than that, I will be studying the documentation related to unit testing my projects (Testing Library, Vitest, etc) and implementing lots of tests into all my projects. It should be a fun time!

With all that said, I wish you all the best in 2025 and hope you enjoy the new year!