Lab Notes - April 10th, 2023

Hi everyone and welcome to the first edition of my newsletter Lab Notes. I currently don’t have any set format for this newsletter, but want to share articles, podcasts, videos, project progress and what ever I find interesting during the week.

To keep it simple, I am going to start with project updates.

Project Updates

Blokfeed

Blokfeed is a news aggregation platform focused on crypto and blockchain news. Daily briefs provide a snapshot of trending topics for the day. Users are also able to sign up and get saved search alerts. Which provide more personalized emails about crypto news they are interested in.

The project has been going to a little more than a year, steadily growing. I’ve recently added AI to write small summaries for articles which are part of the daily briefs. This allows easier ingestion of information for the readers.

I also created a small series on Hashnode, which provides and overview of the project. Check out out here How I build Blokfeed.

ListingQR

ListingQR is a SaaS product which allows realtors to track marketing efforts. It employs dynamic QR codes/links to measure physical and digital marketing efforts.

The project is currently in beta, so if you know of any realtors send them over to ListingQR.

Hal’s Book Reviews

Hal’s Book Reviews is book review site I created to play around with Airtable and Softr. I’ve used these tools sparingly in the past, but recently decided to take a deeper dive into low/no-code tools. As a developer, I’ve always found these tools helpful. I generally use them as an add on to something I’m building, allowing me to get functionality live quicker. Along with these tools, I am using AI to help generate the reviews.

Hal has currently reviewed 75+ books, has a facebook, and twitter presence (automated with Airtable). Organic growth as been choppy, and a bit tricky given some limitations with Softr. But, I’m excited to continue building the site out.

Up Next

The following are projects I am looking to start up

• A service log service for business level logs, not error or system logs

  • I’m always looking to get logs that aren’t really error, system, or engineering logs. But, ones that as a business would be useful to have. Example would be tracking ETL processes, item status updates, to specific change logs. Possibilities are endless.

• Page builder

  • I’ve always wanted to explore building a page builder which could be used to quickly generate landing pages for example. It would be a fun challenge and a ton of learning opportunities.

That’s all I have for today’s newsletter! Hope you enjoyed my project updates. Feel free to check them out and let me know what you think!