After a long while, in July I was able to once again have a very productive month with my personal projects. This years has been incredibly challenging with all the recent changes in the software industry and the uncertainties that come with them, so most of my efforts had to be shifted to compensate for that in my day job. This month, though, I was able to dedicate more time to my own things, here is a short summary of what I accomplished.
Achievements
Several new blog posts
One of the areas I had not been able to touch for several months had been this blog. While I have been trying to always write at least a monthly recap post, describing everything I have been working on during the month, the last time I had written one had been about January. This month I covered the gap, and wrote the recap of what I did every month, up until June. Thankfully I keep quite well-organized notes about everything I work on, so it was not that hard to figure out what went in which month.
Beyond this, I also wrote two more blog posts, one describing my experience with opencode and the other with my analysis of volume 34 of Thoughtworks' Technology Radar. I had been meaning to do both for a long time. The first one I wanted to write because it goes off the beaten path of Claude Code, Codex, etc. I really think opencode brings a promise of cheap experimentation that is very much worth talking about. The second one is an exercise I have been meaning to do ever since I started this blog, which is to share my thoughts about the main discussions happening in the software engineering world. I had already written some posts summarizing my experience in conferences, but never went deep into any major report. The Technology Radar is one that I read every single edition for the past 5 or 6 years, so it was a very natural first choice. And I intend to continue doing so with future editions.
Finished studying Fundamentals Of Software Engineering
I picked up Fundamentals Of Software Engineering as part of my personal studies habit midway through last year, as I was switching teams to work on a new product. I thought it would be a great opportunity to get a stronger theoretical grounding on software architecture, as I would be once again witnessing one emerge. While it was a very bumpy road from then until now, I think studying this book was mostly a positive experience, and while I did not learn a whole lot from it, it helped me organize my thoughts and categorize several ideas and concepts.
First pre-release of new portfolio project
July also saw the first pre-release of my new portfolio project. My last such project was LicLacMoe, which I released in early 2025 (more than a year ago). My plan since 2023 has been to release at a minimum one new portfolio project a year, and ideally two per year. With this new project coming up, I remain on track with the plan for the third year in a row. Although the project can already be found in my GitHub profile, I do not want to talk too much about it yet, as I still intend to improve it before making the first official / major version release. Once I do, I will write a dedicated blog post for it, and include a mention in the respective monthly recap post.
Plans for next month
Start next career book studies
Since I finished Fundamentals Of Software Engineering on July, I am now ready to pick up the next book to study on the career track of my personal studies habit. I am evaluating the ones I had in my backlog in order to pick up the one that makes the most sense right now. By August I should have finished choosing and started studying the next one.
First full release of new portfolio project
As I mentioned before, I have a brand new portfolio project coming up. While the version 0.0.1 is already available, I should soon have the first major version, 1.0.0 ready to release. In August I expect to make this release and write up a blog post about the project, as I have done previously for each recent portfolio project.
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