Happy Sunday ☕️🥐

If you're new here, welcome 👋 You can learn more about this newsletter here.

This week was really busy and went by way too fast.

TLDR:

• [Current tidbit]: Got Grafana up and running to track usage and costs in detail to validate/fine-tune Findur’s pricing model.

• [Findur’s Journey tidbit]: Took a while to figure out the best way to learn software development but found a great combination of YouTube as the core learning platform + Google to fill in the blanks as needed.

• [Bites]: Bread Pudding from @Killen’s was 👌

-------- { Bits & Bites } --------

--- [ 👨‍💻 Bits ] ---

[Current tidbit]

Finished up the first pass of gathering insights using Grafana 🚀 The objective is to be able to understand and track the true operating costs of Findur to adjust the pricing model accordingly. The majority of my costs come from Google's APIs as they're pretty pricey. This can result in expensive searches, hence the importance of being able to track everything (cost of a search = a direct function of listing count and the number of places of interest entered by a user).

A couple of things left before opening it to early users:

• Virtualizing the result list on the FE
• Update the BE logic to determine the number of listings to return based on location type (city/neighborhood)
• See if it’s worth the effort to change over to canvas for the map at this stage

Aiming to open the app for early users on the waitlist in about ~2 weeks and providing free access for the first month 🤞

[Findur's Journey tidbit: Learning how to learn]

If you didn't catch the why of Findur, you can check out the issue here.

I really didn't know where to start learning or even how to go about it. I started searching "how to build web apps", "what goes into building a web app" etc.

I found that simply using Google wasn't going to cut it so I went to YouTube. Turns out, it's a gold mine of information (and has since been my go-to). I quickly picked up on the fact that there are 3 general categories of tech content creators:

1. People genuinely teach what they've learned based on their experiences giving the “why’s” into their thought process.
2. People who go through a tutorial and provide some basic examples to showcase the feature.
3. The focus is more on how cool coding is vs actual lessons.

The first group is the hardest to find but their content is phenomenal for a new person like me (Thanks y’all ✌️). I was lucky to pick up on a few and started watching all their videos at 1.5x-2x to get through all the information as fast as I could. It was (and is) helpful to have a few different people telling you the same information in different ways. Sometimes it just takes a bit of re-wording to get certain concepts to stick.

Anytime I heard a word that I didn't know (like React), I would pause the video and search the "what and why" until I was able to grasp the concept clearly ( at least initially on a high level). I'd then go back to the video and keep going through the content.

Rinse and repeat about 1,000x and the puzzle pieces started to loosely fit together. HTML, CSS, and JS were the core three that were mentioned everywhere and used in every tutorial. It was pretty clear these were the building blocks of the web (Front-end portion). Everything else for the most part was an abstraction that sits on top to make working with them a bit easier sprinkled with some magic in between to do some cool things.

One thing I learned throughout the years is that if your foundation is solid, you'll be a lot more skilled at using other tools that utilize these elements at their core. You'll be able to grasp how they fit into the bigger picture and their inner workings (which makes debugging much easier too).

I bought a course or two from some of the creators I found on HTML/CSS/JS and solely focused on that for about 2 months.

To be continued...

--- [ 🍪 Bites ] ---

Food Review Reference:

• 👎: Nope, not it
• 🤏: Meh
• 👍: Good, not complaining
• 👌: Top Notch

It was our 8-year engagement anniversary this week (talk about time flying). Safia grabbed some takeout from a place I really like. First time having their bread pudding and it was 👌 The photo below is from a review on google. I got too excited and forgot to take the picture 😅

Foodie Bites: Killen’s BBQ is rated one of the best BBQ places in Texas ⭐️