Welcome to the March 2025 retrospective. This will be a shorter retrospective than usual, as March has been a busy month, but also slow and cut short due to personal reasons. However, I’m still happy with the progress I’ve made, and I’m looking forward to the next steps.

Bringing Catalyst to parity

As mentioned in the February retrospective, I wanted to bring Catalyst to feature parity with the previous version. I think this has now been achieved, and the way in which these features are implemented should be much more robust and easier to maintain than before. For example, in the previous version, the database relationship between projects, branches and posts were complicated and messy, as were their queries. Now, they are much simpler, you get the data you need, where you need it, which will also be a security benefit.

However, I don’t consider Catalyst to be feature complete yet, and I’m still working on some of the features that I’ve wanted to implement. Notably, I’m finishing work on two timelines: one for trending contributions, another for contributions made by people you follow. This is what users coming into the website will see first, so I want to get it just right, and make them useful and easy to understand. After this, I need to put some finishing touches on the project, like adding a search bar, adding an user settings page, reducing codebase repetition and unnecessary complexity, etc.

What’s next?

During April, I will focus on finishing up Catalyst. After that, I would like to do a quality check on some of my older projects, and see if I can improve them. Finally, I will start working on a new project, which will be an online movie theater of sorts, in which I will get to work with web sockets to implement a real-time chat system, ticketing systems, video streaming, load balancing, etc. I’m excited and a bit nervous about how complex this project will be, but it is after all a learning project, so as long as I can learn something new, I’m happy.

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