Welcome to the July 2025 retrospective. Similar to the previous month, it has been a quiet month, but I’ve been laying down the groundwork to advance my skills and knowledge.

Updating dependencies and features

During July, I’ve been working on updating ESIA, one of my older projects, an art gallery website. The update is not yet fully complete, but I’ve already implemented many changes that will improve the website’s performance and usability. I updated the project’s dependencies, which, given the age of the project, was a bit trickier than usual. After that, I worked on virtualizing the various lists of artworks, so the user can scroll through them without having to load them all at once. Before, we used a tRPC infinite query, but that led to a sloppy experience when the user scrolled through the list.

Next, I worked on various facets of the user interface, modernizing the design, making it more accessible and clear for the user.

Data Structures, Algorithms and React

Most of my time this month has gone towards brushing up on my data structures and algorithms knowledge. I’ve been going over a couple books, and I’ve been applying what I learned to LeetCode exercises. The first few exercises were almost impossible for me, but I’m slowly getting better and it feels like I’m understanding the process better.

Apart from Data Structures and Algorithms, I’ve been going through the React documentation. Of course, most of my projects are built with React, but I felt I lacked a deep understanding of what’s going on under the hood. Rendering, how state is managed and the lifecycle of events are all things I had only a cursory understanding of before, and I’ve been able to understand them much better now.

What’s next?

During August, I will continue updating my older projects, and I am hoping to finally look into AWS. Aside from that, I will brush up on certain DevOps topics that will help me as I get into AWS, such as CI/CD, containerization, and infrastructure as code.

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