Topics covered: short term planning, building a 5⭐️ DX, escaping obsessive thinking patterns

Transitioning from Designing to Implementing

This month felt a lot like a transition towards an all-new phase to me, both personally and for Batchbrew. After pushing most architectural designs last month to completion, May started with a big review of the full picture. We’re now talking „my Figjam got so big it gets laggy periodically“ 🥸🐌 we’ll, a restart helps, but that’s some big board!

Initially taking the start of the month a bit slower, I went through the full picture to get a feeling for how the whole tech stack will play out, seeing what has to happen in which order, and to shed light on what’s still open and can be pushed to autumn. Knowing how Batchbrew should work, and having the algorithms sketched out certainly helped a lot in planning tasks for the first release. And boy do I want that release… first estimate for the magic to happen: 7.5 months. Ciao 👋🏽👋🏽

Timing and Roadmap: can this happen by 10th of September?

So obviously I don’t want to work 8 months without a release, but I also don’t want to release an unfinished product. I want to trust the Database to keep my data, and I have high expectations for the UX. I want BB to feel so good I love working with it when I'm in a café with edge network and no WiFi 🤬 - that frightening constellation of stars when my usual notes app either "forgot" to cache some important page, or makes me go paranoid for losing my newly added notes because "synchronising will be resumed when you're back online - maybeee".

Luckily my approach to build small, stackable components also plays nicely into task prioritisation: there is a certain set of building blocks which have to be in place to get the base-functionality working, and can be extended and combined later on to expose more powerful features in the app. So I’ll see if I really need 8 months to get that whole product ready, but I should be able to get „something“ out by the 10th of September that checks the boxes for a great yet simple initial product with a single feature or so. That said, after taking on the hat of a project manager and doing a a bit of PMming I have sketched out and prioritized all tasks for the next 8 months (or so 🫢)

A 5-Star DX

The month went on with preparing my DX for the upcoming workload. Something I learned when I was working for Magicbell.io was how big the influence of a great DX is on developer productivity (and, well, sanity of mind haha). So I invested the time to get my monorepo set up with turborepo, TS, ESlint, japa, vitest, wrangler, ... and I love it! 😍 reusable components, strong typing and useful limiting that „just works“, package-specific builds and testing pipelines, hot rebuilds, oh and it's as fast as a racing car 🏎️ it was worth it, and I'm curious to see how it will play out in CI/CD.

In line with that, I checked off the tasks for some architectural refactoring to get my existing code migrated to match the designs I made on Figjam. I initially planned to introduce an ORM as well, but after playing around with that I concluded that it’s generating too much noise for too little benefits. Instead I went for a solution closer to the database by setting up a type-safe query builder with Kysely. Going for that approach ties in much nicer with my algorithmic designs, where I mainly operate on raw data and wouldn’t really have any benefit from using an object mapping. BB‘s stack is designed around primitives, not around domains. Knowing the domain, but looking beyond it and extracting the few basic building blocks that can drive that domain turned out to be much more powerful.

Understanding how to move my mind

On a personal side, I used this month's experiences to challenge myself further to cut through on why my mind sometimes goes to dark, painful places. A selection of the 5 hindrances come to mind, literally. I found myself confronted with similar situations that would cause my mind to obsessively go into circles. Only that I was able to apply my insight from the past months to observe what’s happening. A good share of mindfulness and honesty helped to uncover the few things that my heart truly beats for, and revealed to me shier emptiness that arises when I give myself to those hazardous situations.

Knowing the truth of what I've been attaching to allows me to escape that awful grasp that the stories I told myself would usually exhibit on my mind. But beyond that mental freedom, I was confronted with the responsibility to actually take action in alignment to my heart. And precisely that knowledge is what I gained this month: how moving my mind to new, intentionally chosen places actually is done ✨ it‘s the cultivation of curiosity, combined with the ability to allow some thought to be unfinished, with a touch of mindful observation of the mind. I’m writing a blog post about this profound insight on Medium, prob coming out soon.

Cool. So that’s out.

Grateful for

the very interesting situations and people that entered my life this month. Shout out to Tati for showing me what’s possible when we are truly present with our mind
The piano in that flat I've been at. Again. Still.
Four Tet dropping a new set on his YT channel
My mosquito trap 🪤

Thank you for reading, it's great having you here ❤️ and see ya'll next month 👋🏽

Learn more about Batchbrew: https://batchbrew.xyz/
Read my blog (the other one): https://medium.com/@giorgiogross

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