May 2023: South Korea Mountains and Unlighthouse Goes Viral

Personal Updates

South Korea Travel

In May, we finished up our time in Thailand and traveled to South Korea for 2 weeks.

• Seoul - Amazing city with so much to do. The culture is very unique and the mountains surrounding the city are beautiful.
• Busan - Coastal city, kind of reminded me of the Gold Coast in Australia.
• Jeju - Island off the south coast of South Korea. Beautiful beaches and hiking.

We really loved the food, especially the Korean BBQ and bipimbap.

They had surprisingly good coffee, craft beer and pastries, which I partook in generously.

Hiking Bukhansan Mountain in Seoul and Hallasan Mountain in Jeju were definitely the highlights.

I would love to return one day and explore more of the country.

Indonesia Travel

After South Korea, we flew to Jakarta, Indonesia with a quick stop over in Singapore. We'll spend the next month here, until mid-June when we head back to Australia.

We're taking Indonesia pretty slow. It's nice to have a bit of a break after the busy itinerary in South Korea and Thailand.

• Yogyakarta - University town, lots of culture, art and history. Hostels here have a really nice, social vibe.
• Bali - Ubud and Canggu. Canggu is very touristy, but the food is worth it. Melbourne Cafe tier. Ubud is quite touristy too, but you can see some amazing sights around like rice fields, temples and waterfalls.
• Gili Islands - Good snorkeling and chilling. (currently here)
• Flores - Planning lots of hikes for here. We're looking forward to Komodo National Park and Kelimutu volcano.

Work Updates

Unlighthouse Goes Viral

Last month I had a DM from someone telling me that they had put Unlighthouse front of Jeff from Fireship.

I thought that was pretty cool in of itself, and I didn't think much more about it.

Next thing I knew, though, the Unlighthouse stars started going bananas.

I did some quick research and found the culprit.

Very cool.

And with that, I had a massive influx of issues to deal with through GitHub and my Discord.

I started working through them, I would solve one, and two more would appear. It took me the rest of my May to get control of them.

It wasn't a bad problem to have though. I'm grateful to have Unlighthouse being used by so many people, and I'm glad it's helping people improve their sites.

It's given me a lot of ideas for how to improve it, and I'm excited to work on it more in the future.

Numbers / Financials

• ⭐ 5407 GitHub stars (+1628)

Open-Source

• ⌛ 84 hrs (+13.25 hrs)
• 💸 $744 AUD (-$269) - Payout from Windi CSS the month before.
• $8.85 AUD / hour (-$5.46 / hour)

Main projects

• 27 hours Unlighthouse

Some important improvements around reporting, authentication, how the chrome binary is used and Docker.

• 23 hours nuxt-seo-kit

Extracting the breadcrumbs and site config logic into separate modules in preparation of v2. These will be released soon.

• 8 hours nuxt-og-image

Getting the final issues solved so the v2 release can happen.

• 7.5 hours nuxt-simple-sitemap

Some outstanding issues around runtime sitemaps and i18n.

Freelancing

• ⌛ 8.25 hrs (+0.75 hrs)
• 💸 $1,025 AUD (+$800)
• $124.24 AUD / hour (+24.24 / hour)

I started some SEO work for a new client.

The work was to fix site-wide technical issues from Google Lighthouse. This is exactly why I originally built Unlighthouse, so it was perfect.

June plans

I'll be landing back in Australia toward the middle of June.

I look forward to having a few weeks of routine. I'll use this time to focus on getting Nuxt SEO Kit v2 released.

Final thoughts

I'm really grateful to see the growth in Unlighthouse this month, and I'm excited to finally release what I've been working on the for the last few months.

Thanks as always to my amazing sponsors. See you next month. .