What I Built This Week: May 27th-31st, 2024

Background Noise

One of my long-term personal projects is a custom house build. I’m just about finished with land prep and getting utilities in. The next task is to finish clearing trees for the septic field and get a tank placed/leech lines laid and installing temporary power service so I can run tools while I build.

I’ve slowed down a bit over the past year as CheatCode work became more of a priority. Now that a lot of that stuff is clearing off the plate, I’m starting to think about how best to approach the next steps/building. A go-to since I started the project is watching videos by DIY homebuilders for fun to pick up tips and tricks along the way.

One of my favorite YouTube channels is Home RenoVision DIY. The host, Jeff, and his son do deep dives on DIY construction and renovation. Their videos have been a big help and I’ve picked up a lot of little tips on the way. They released a long, ~4 hour video on doing a start-to-finish build of a shed that was equally entertaining and educational.

Great background noise to have on while you’re coding.

CheatCode

A lot of thinking this week on the CheatCode front. I’ve been trying to figure out where to steer the brand, who it’s for, and what approach to take with marketing and focus (i.e., which products/services to work on, what to scrap, etc).

The good news: I think I figured it out. I’m not quite ready to unveil anything just yet, but I did spend some time starting a rewrite of the CheatCode marketing website to match the new direction. I’m fairly happy with the result so far and I think it will resonate a lot better with others once it’s live.

I also figured out a way to simplify the dashboard for deployments via Push. I did a rapid fire rebuild of the original last year, but in using it to manage my own apps and client apps, it’s not quite hitting the mark.

The version I sketched out this week takes the lessons learned and ended up being a 50/50 split between what I did in the first and second iteration. I’m not sure when I’ll get to implementing it, but I’m excited to get it built and out the door.

Clients

This week was primarily spent finishing the last few big features for Moumint: ability to uptrade cards (trade a lower value card for a higher value one), finishing touches/wiring on the pack opening UX, and starting to fill in the missing back-end pieces for UI I had already designed.

I think my favorite riff of the week was on the gallery editor. I set it up so you can adapt the theme of your public gallery to use one of 4 different layouts. The approach was to leverage Joystick’s state/reactivity mixed with CSS Grid which made for some really nice, complex layouts with relatively little code (the kids don’t realize how good they have it these days—IE6 flashbacks...good lord).

Doing this work got me thinking quite a bit about feature design and the importance of taking the necessary time to reason through UI/UX/implementation of a feature. That ended up resulting in this post on why I think that’s so important.

Next Week

I’ll finally be getting back to some Joystick tasks that have been long-standing. I did do a little research this week into migrating Joystick’s supported databases directly into the framework as binaries.

Right now, you have to have a database installed on your machine, but this will make it so Joystick just ships with what you need (it will download the necessary binaries for your database and run from that copy as opposed to your OS installed copy).

I need to carve out some time for a longer session on Mod so I can wrap up the last few free components. I think the plan will be to do a beta/pre-release with the free, core components and then roll out some of the more advanced, paid stuff later this year.

As-is, everything in Mod is framework-agnostic (you can just use it in a plain HTML site if you’d like), but I’d like to offer some pre-built Joystick components that can just snap into your app.