Weekly Pull Request: 09/13/2024

If you’ve been reading my newsletter, you’ll know that on Fridays, I tell you guys what’s been on my playlist for the past week. Well, it got me thinking. I want to give you guys some more value with this newsletter, so I’m going to make a small change to my Friday articles.

Here is the Weekly Pull Request for September 13th, 2024!

Table of Contents

• Playlist

• Tech

• Code

Playlist

Lakeview - Self-Titled

One of my favorite bands right now. Luke and Jesse really pulled out all of the stops for this one. This album is the perfect collision of metalcore, rock, and country music. I really think these guys are going to do big things. If you like country, but want something a bit rougher around the edges, give these guys a listen.

Knocked Loose - You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To

What can I say? This one slaps. I recently revisited this album with the release of their new music video, and it is still one of my favorite albums of 2024. Extremely heavy, incredible lyricism, and overall just a very, very creative take on heavy music. Knocked Loose is that band, and will forever be one of my favorites.

Lofi Girl Playlist

C’mon, this can’t be a tech newsletter without the mention of this famous playlist. I love some good lofi hip-hop. It gets me in the zone keeps me hyper-focused when I’m trying to get some deep work done. If you didn’t know about this playlist, now you know!

Tech

CMF Watch Pro 2

I came across this watch thanks to RandomFrankP, a tech Youtuber known for his “Cool tech Under $50” or “Cool tech Under $100” series. I’ve had this watch for a few days now and wow. for the $70 price point, this watch delivers so much value. For me, it does everything that I’d need out of an everyday smartwatch. It has blood oxygen level and heart rate monitoring, sleep tracking, meditation exercises, weather, phone call connectivity capabilities, and so much more. The watch does occasionally lose connectivity if you place your phone to far away from it (I’m talking like next room), but is very easy to reconnect via the app.

The app is great too, and I had no issues setting it up with my iPhone, and it offers several stunningly beautiful & creative watch faces. Overall, this watch punches well above its weight class and I highly recommend it.

Code

Tourpass

I am working on a startup app called Tourpass, which is an app I’m making for musicians. I don’t want to give too much away at the moment, but I am hoping that this idea will make a huge impact on accessibility to resources for independent artists.

So far, authentication and the dashboard UI are complete. If you’re a dev, you know that front end is constantly iterated upon. This project is teaching me to “build fast and break things”, meaning that I am focusing more on getting a product in the hands of some test users quickly, and then can go back and factor based on feedback. I realize that I am a perfectionist, and if I fall into old habits, I’ll never ship.

I’m looking forward to sharing more updates soon!

Custom Bakery Marketing Website

This one is a cool project. My friend owns a bakery business, With Love, Cake based in Oxford, Michigan and they’re looking for a facelift to their web presence.

Wanting something a little more tech-forward, with the ability to accept orders from customers and a sleek UI, we are migrating their existing Wordpress site to a custom website built with Astro.js, React Email, and Resend, while still using Wordpress as a headless CMS.

Overall, I think that this will be a very cool upgrade, giving them the best of both worlds when it comes to Server-Side Rendering and Client-Side Interactivity, while still retaining familiarity with content management.

If you’d like to support their business, check out their old site here. New site coming soon!

I hope you enjoyed this first iteration of the Weekly Pull Request! If you have any other suggestions for what you’d like to see in this series, let me know! Otherwise, have a great weekend!

Build Fast. Break Stuff. Have Fun.

Paps