Welcome to the May 2025 retrospective. May has been a pretty interesting month, with a lot of quiet work done. My computer broke down, so I had to take a few days off while I set up a new one.

Finalizing Catalyst

As mentioned in the previous retrospective, Catalyst was missing a few finishing touches. I’m happy to say that is now complete, and I consider the project feature complete. Catalyst has been my biggest project to date, and I’ve learned a lot about the technologies I used, and how to use them. Server actions, how to handle errors, how to optimize database queries, and so much more. Catalyst has been a great learning experience, and it has often suffered because of it, so I’m really happy with how it’s turned out.

LangDB Frontend

Last month, I mentioned that I had been working on an API for my German studies. Initially, I wasn’t going to do much more with it, but it felt wrong to leave the backend without a frontend. Since the backend was built with NestJS, which uses very similar structures to Angular, I decided to use this project to practice my Angular skills.

The project now has different views to add the different types of data to the database from the frontend, and a view to practice any of the selected types of data (nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc.).

I would qualify this project as very basic, as I haven’t had to deal with things such as authentication, but I handled the basics of both NestJS and Angular. In the future I would like to add further features to this project, so it can serve as a true one-stop hub for people who are learning a language. For example, a better way to handle words, so the user can build a dictionary, or a way to share your knowledge base with others.

New projects

I took a small detour from my main projects to work on some new ones. In particular, I’ve been working on XIV Raider, which will serve as another tool in my Final Fantasy XIV suite, along with XIV Raidbot and XIV Dungeoneer.

XIV Raider helps raid groups of players in Final Fantasy XIV by letting them see who needs what items, and what priority the group should have while handling items. Users can create groups, invite others to join via an invite link, and then they can create their characters and the website will automatically display who needs what items. It is a rather simple project, but one that I believe will be useful for a lot of people.

Studies

After some time without studying technologies, I decided to start looking into some of them again. In particular, looking into SEO, Accessibility, how Node.js truly works, and AWS Basics. In particular, I’m looking forward to learn more about how to use AWS, as it seems a fundamental part of the industry.

What’s next?

During June I will do a codebase check on some of my older projects, and keep progressing through my studies. It will, therefore, be a pretty quiet month, but I’m hoping to learn new things and improve as a developer.

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