☀️ Summer Update

The first of September is traditionally the first day of school in Belgium and a day I’ve always dreaded since it meant the end of summer. If you still dread this day I hope my little newsletter can cheer you up a bit.

It’s been 6 months since my last newsletter which means I’m absolutely holding myself to my rule of not spamming your inbox. 😅

Luckily I haven’t been sitting still for the last 6 months, between some travelling, learning to snowboard and being outside more after staying inside for 2 years due to covid restrictions, I was able to make some progress on some side projects.

In the last newsletter, I teased that I started doing some hardware hacking on the Nintendo Powerglove. And honestly, this thing is making me feel like I’m way out of my league. I feel like I need a PhD in Signal Processing and Advanced Math if I ever want to finish it. However! I was able to simulate my hand in 3D! At least kind of…

You can read about how I struggled to learn quaternions in #10 PowerGlove Update - Quaternions.

At the beginning of summer, I got bitten by the niche site bug. The idea of a niche site is that you start a blog on a certain specific topic, preferably in a small subdomain.

For example, if I’d like to make a blog about outdoor traveling, I could start a blog about tents, writing blog posts comparing tents, which materials are best in which weather conditions etc.

I didn’t want to buy yet another new domain and I had written quite some notes for my GCP Security exam, so I threw out a few features I had written for GCPSecured and just made it a blog for now. I kind of want to aim at 20 articles by the end of the year but I currently only have 2 and some notes. I’ve quite a few drafts but you need a lot of words to get to the recommended blog article length.

If you’d like to get started on this I would recommend checking out Income School on Youtube, they have a lot of great and free content.

Another project I have been tinkering on is CloudPurse. CloudPurse is a budgeting tool for Google Cloud.

I’ve read a few horror stories about cloud bills getting out of hand and I have experienced some unexpected cloud bills of my own when I forgot to turn off some services. So I wrote a little script to monitor them and shut down any unwanted resources.

I've built a landing page for it back in 2021 but didn’t do much with it. Over the summer I made a new landing page and finished the monitoring functionality. I should be able to launch the demo soon.

I purchased DivJoy and Tailwind UI and it really sped up development compared to other projects I did in the past. I had most of the platform (authentication, storage) linked in a weekend and could focus on the functionality and the UI. Wrote a bit more about this mind-shift in Makerlog #09 - No More Reinventing Wheels.

Going over my website analytics it’s pretty cool to see that I have crossed 1000 views on my main website this year. My content also seems to be popular in Russia since Yandex likes to rank my content better than Google.

I also managed to sabotage myself by accidentally removing all my articles from Google Search while trying to improve my SEO. If you want to have a laugh you can read my SEO-Oopsy story.

That’s it for this newsletter. It felt good to reflect back on 6 months and see the progress made. But I do hope to make these a bit more regular. 😅

If you are still reading feel free to subscribe to this newsletter. My mailbox is also open for any replies so feel free to write something back! I’ve already had a few people reach out on Twitter and IRL and it’s awesome to hear that you are actually enjoying my content.

Thanks for reading! 👋