What I Built This Week: June 3rd-7th, 2024

Background Noise

I couldn’t tell you when, but I recall picking up the habit of listening to the same song on loop while working from Matt Mullenweg (WordPress founder) sometime in the last 10 years or so. Just hit the repeat 1 button in Spotify or whatever you use to listen to music and dig in to your work. The catchier the song, the better it helps with focus.

This week, I got hooked on the song Kool-Aid by Bring Me the Horizon. If you’re into metal/hardcore music, you might dig it too.

CheatCode

Started to make some progress and rough out ideas on the new direction for CheatCode (that sounds more dramatic than it actually is). The way that I tend to do this is to start from the marketing side and build out a rough landing page. I came up with a cool way (imo) to show off Joystick in a non-traditional way. If you’ve been following my work for a long time, it made me nostalgic about The Meteor Chef days, if that’s any hint.

Mod

FINALLY getting back to thinking about Mod. I cracked open the repo where I’ve been building out components and started to think about a better approach. I realized that the existing structure, while functional, was going to melt my brain long-term.

So, I decided to spend an evening building a prototype for a new UI for building/showcasing components (the same app I use to design components will be what you have access to to consume them). The result? Much better than what I had before and far easier to build against.

This should help speed things up quite a bit. Still on track for a summer release which, now, should be sooner than I expected. Goal is to release an early version with a light theme and the base components first, then roll out a dark theme and additional components for a one-time payment with lifetime access to new components.

Clients

Finally rounding 3rd base on the Moumint v2 build. This week was a grab bag of stuff that I left till the end for sake of ease/time. A lot of what I had left to do was fringe stuff—adding functionality to existing features, fixing edge cases, and doing grunt work like making sure I had all of the translation tags in the UI (in Joystick, you get an i18n() function passed to your component that lets you map to an i18n string in one of your translation files).

I also implemented a real-time global search for the site’s navigation and rigged up a little module for tracking user activity in the app (e.g., someone claimed a collection/drop, followed another user, etc). I was fairly pleased with the data model I came up with to reduce the load on the DB. Instead of doing a single document per activity event, per follower, I opted to just have a single activity event with a recipients array.

That way, when someone wants to see the latest activity of the people they follow, I can do a simple MongoDB $in query to find all recent activity where the current user’s ID is in that activity document’s recipients array.

Next Week

Now that I’m in the testing phases of Moumint v2, I’m going to focus back on Mod for a little bit (I’ll inevitably geek out on the new CheatCode direction/landing page stuff, too). I’ll be sharing some more Mod stuff as I start to get back up to speed. Really excited to put the new set up to the test.