Weekly Update: v2023.6.12

Last week I moved a few projects forward but felt like I lost some momentum toward the tail end of the week. I accomplished most tasks I wanted to early on and then coasted.

To try and fix that, we're upping the goals and trying to be a little more ambitious. This is also a short week since I came back from a wedding on Monday.

Also, maybe... slow weeks aren't the worst? It's okay to take a break. Maybe?

I contributed to Next.js for the first time!

docs: Correct `useFormStatus` to be a client component by ethanmick · Pull Request #50991 · vercel/next.js

What?The useFormStatus needs to be used in a client component. That component should be used within a form for the pending property to reflect the form status.Why?The docs are currently not accu…

GitHubvercel

Okay, okay, calm down; it's a documentation fix. But it was a good experience, and I love being able to jump in and help a large project. They made the process super easy, which was fantastic.

Lotus

I got the Lotus TextField working. It works great, although when the border changes, the layout jiggles a little. That's not ideal. I didn't really notice it until I created the UI for a video later.

For the curious, this is what it looks like.

I'm curious to see how Shadcn's styling will work: https://twitter.com/shadcn/status/1668350007714672640. Something I'm keeping my eye on.

I also created a repo for Lotus:

GitHub - a-bit-of-saas/lotus-ux

Contribute to a-bit-of-saas/lotus-ux development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHuba-bit-of-saas

It currently syncs with my private monorepo for abitofsaas.com. I'm not sure that's how it's going to stay forever, but I wanted to give it a try to start.

Freelancing

There's been a good push to finish up the website I'm working on with the startup. It's in the final stretch but might be there for a while. I'm tweaking things and waiting on content (images, videos) for the last few items.

One thing that was annoying was we discovered that the hero animation performs poorly on older laptops. It's a Lottie animation, and it grinds to a halt when it runs inside a CSS transform. The entire thing just drops all the frames.

Since we've simplified the animation, I might just remake it in Framer Motion.

I sent out an SOW for phase 2 of a migration project. The final quote was $17,495, which felt fair. I'll be setting up their entire AWS account and migrating several apps over several weeks. Once migrated, I'll chat with them about a potential support contract. Otherwise, the apps are just going to run... until they don't.

Content

I posted my video on verifying a user email:

It's solid. I'm noticing that my view counts are not that high, even though my subscribers are going up.

It's kinda a catch-22. I've made videos on some obvious topics, and now I've been moving toward more niche how-tos. My setup Next Auth video has 12k views! What other topics are so consistent for a SaaS other than authentication? It's the first tricky thing most people run into.

I think I'll take a break from the how-tos and build a SaaS over many videos. It'll give me something different to do and walk through how to do everything end-to-end.

The Week Ahead

• Touch base with several clients on potential projects
• Ship my first video on building a SaaS end-to-end.
• Lotus Avatar
• Lotus Checkbox
• Lotus Radio Group (as well as a large button option)