Welcome to the June 2025 retrospective. As expected, it’s been a quiet month with no big news, but I’ve been doing a lot of work, so let’s get to it.

Touching up old projects

At the start of June, I worked on the final touches of XIV Raider, my Final Fantasy XIV raiding group management tool. I opted for remaking the UI, and decided on a very bold design that uses many aspects of CSS I had never used before. Furthermore, I implemented Redis, proper SEO features and accessibility. Overall, I feel like this project is now complete, and a good example of my capabilities as a developer.

After XIV Raider, I noticed certain UI issues in my portfolio website: a lot of dead space, hover effects that didn’t feel right, and a poor design for the project and retrospective cards. To fix this, I decided on a much leaner design, where the important information is made more prominent via colorful borders, the hover effects is more direct, and the cards integrate better with the rest of the website. Additionally, I updated many of the projects’ pages with new information and expaded explanations. I am very pleased with the result, as I feel the website is now much more polished and modern.

Lastly, Dungeoneer needed some work. One of my biggest projects, I had been neglecting for a while. I updated how certain data is fetched as the external APIs changed, implemented Storybook, and added many new unit tests. Furthermore, and perhaps most importantly, I virtualized the instance and collectible list items, so the user can scroll through them without having to load them all at once. This made the website perform much better. Finally, I added ‘silent sign in’ to the website thanks to the Credential API. Although this is not widely supported yet, it seems like a great feature that will make the website more accessible.

Go

A big part of my time this month has been dedicated to learning Go. I’ve been wanting to study Go for a while, as it seems to be a very interesting and powerful language, and I decided now would be a good time to start. I’ve been going over several resources, such as the Tour of Go, Go By Example, and Go Web Examples, and although certain topics, such as channels and slices, are still a bit confusing, I feel like I have a good grasp of the language.

It is a known truth that the best way to learn a language is to build something with it. And that’s exactly what I’ve been doing. I’ve been working on a Go backend for my Gasthaus project, my restaurant website. I’ve been using the Gorilla Mux package to create a RESTful API, and I’m happy to say I’ve been able to create a working backend with PostgreSQL database integration, JWT-based authentication and file uploading to a Supabase Bucket. Although I don’t think this project will be expanded much further, I feel like it gave me a level of understading of the language that the learning resources can’t match.

What’s next?

During July I will continue learning Go, and I am hoping to dive into AWS, a topic I’ve been wanting to learn for a long time. I will also continue working on my older projects and try to improve them. As such, I expect it will be another month of quiet work, but hopefully a lot will get done and learned.

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