It’s mid february, I’m in london splitting my time between my flat and my partners place. The key focuses in my life right now are planning for an upcoming move, attempting to resolve a complicated social situation, pouring as much time as I can muster into personal projects and work, and feeling deeply anxious about current events(aren’t we all).

At Anzen we’re overhauling our product UI, we’re migrating to an adapted tailwind template and I’m falling further and further in love with tailwind and how quickly and effectively we are able to prototype clean, functional, responsive components. At the same time i’m continuing to develop a new API microservice that slots into our existing core product stack to allow customers to manage various operational flows, the next task is to implement some form of JWT authorisation from scratch, which will be something new to me.

I’ve just launched this site, hosted entirely on AWS, it’s a Cloudfront distribution pointing to an S3 bucket containing code generated by a lightweight go static site generator I wrote from scratch. I’m proud of the outcome and I’m thoroughly enjoying continuing to develop and improve my build functions and automation tools, most recently I created a github actions workflow that runs the generator functions, builds tailwind CSS classes, and deploys to AWS on push to the main branch on github. Next I need to write up copy for all the more static descriptions and pages.

It looks like the aforementioned focus points will be resolving themselves over the next month or so, so my priorities moving forward are to pick up learning japanese again in preparation for an upcoming trip later in the year, and I want to build and release a lightweight application for rapidly adding descriptions and metadata to analogue 35mm film scans. This is a pain point I’ve been struggling with while compiling collections of old images to post on the site as scans I’ve received from labs often have no metadata, and the various apps and methods i’ve trialed up to this point aren’t a good fit for the particular workflow I have in mind.