April 2023: Thai New Year and Nuxt SEO Progress
Meet up
I'm back in Sydney for a couple of months while working on open-source.
In the area and want to catch up? Get in touch!
Personal Updates
A Month In Thailand
We spent all of April in Thailand, 38 days total. We got lucky to sneak into Thailand just before they removed the 45-day visa on arrival.
As you'll know from the last update, we started the month in Ko Chang.
For those interested in our route afterward:
- Chanthaburi - A small and quiet town with charm, known for its gemstones.
- Pattaya - Caught up with some friends here to celebrate Thai New Year.
- Krabi - Amazing rock formations. Would highly recommend mangrove canoeing.
- Ko Phi Phi - Tiny scenic island but very touristy. Think bucket cocktails for $4.
- Khao Sok - Jungle, caves, lakes, monkeys and waterfalls. One of my favourite places in Thailand.
- Chiang Mai - Super-chill and relaxed city. Great food, great people, great vibes.
- Pai - Quite touristy with a hippy vibe. The surrounding nature is amazing.
Thai New Year 🇹🇭
We were lucky enough to be in Thailand for Songkran.
Songkran is a festival to mark the start of the Buddhist New Year. Water is thrown to symbolize the washing away of sins and bad luck.
We spent the holiday hanging out with our friends and the Thai locals, throwing icy-cold water at passers-by on the street.
Work Updates
Nuxt SEO Kit v2 Module Progress
Getting v2 of Nuxt SEO Kit has been weighing on me for a while.
Making progress towards it meant solving some particularly annoying bugs.
Most of my time was spent on nuxt-og-image.
It has been a challenging module.
Debugging WASM code, sifting through nitro code and testing on a number of cloud providers.
I went through 30 beta releases and things are looking better.
The rest went into nuxt-simple-sitemap.
In March, I decided to add support for i18n.
I18n is complicated.
While there is still some more work to do it's a lot more stable and the improvements will be incremental.
Numbers / Financials
- ⭐ 3779 GitHub stars (+199)
Open-Source
- ⌛ 70.75 hrs (-17.25 hrs)
- 💸 $1,013 AUD (+$226) - Had a payout from the Windi CSS project as it was sunset.
- $14.32 AUD / hour (+$5.38 / hour) - Highest yet! Although this was mostly a one-off.
Main projects
- 34 hours nuxt-og-image
- 16.5 hours nuxt-simple-sitemap
- 6 hours Nuxt
Freelancing
- ⌛ 2.25 hrs (-4.75 hrs)
- 💸 $225 AUD (-$420)
- $100 AUD / hour (-$7 / hour)
April's focus was on open-source work.
I had two organic leads come in. I decided to push the meetings to May where I had more availability while traveling.
May plans
In April, I wanted to get Nuxt SEO Kit v2 out. This was optimistic and unrealistic, unfortunately.
May's plan is to continue the work towards it. The estimate for a Nuxt SEO Kit v2 stable release is still a few months away.
Final thoughts
It was a really fun month in Thailand, I had a good balance of work and traveling. It's never satisfying just working on bugs and issues, there's not much to show for it.
But this is the way open-source works it seems. Periods of rapid development and then periods of slow but steady maintenance to get things stable.
Thanks for reading and thanks to my amazing sponsors.