Now — Late 2019

What stays the same

• After four months, Radio Lanza is already on its 14th episode, keeping up with a precise weekly schedule. The show has increased its audience far beyond what I expected, covering a wide range of topics. Besides the regular programming it has also featured interviews with experts, especial episodes, and even questions from our listeners.
• Learning about physics through the Feynman Lectures turned out to be a terrific idea, but also harder than expected. My physics memories from college were in worse shape than I predicted and advances have been sluggish. However, the materials are engaging and, slowly but surely, I will eventually finish them.

What’s new

A good friend of mine happens to be a distinguished foodie in town. Despite her humbleness — she would never consider herself as such — products sometimes speak louder than words, and here’s the app she built to back my statement up. A self-curated guide that will recommend the perfect spot based on your preferences.

It turns out, the app has reached its technical boundaries, and it is currently ill-equipped to support its upcoming product roadmap. Well, as a side-project, I’m helping her re-build Ask Irene from scratch to fulfill, from the software perspective, her vision of the project.

By the end of August, I also started the #TIL micro-project — a healthy practice of publishing a daily Tweet about something I’ve learned. If you want to learn more of it, I wrote about the project’s rationale in this post, and also commented on a few unexpected side effects during a recent episode of Radio Lanza.

Finally, I thought it might make sense to bundle here all the changes I’ve made during these months at collado.io — a meta update of sorts. Hence, right below, the very first edition of the changelog.

Changelog

✨ New Features

• Changelog: these very lines are the new feature by itself. Rendered at the bottom of each Now post, it aims to summarize “what’s new” at collado.io.
• Radio Lanza episode feed: the entire show notes collection of Radio Lanza is now available in its own work page.
• Embedded web player at the top of each Radio Lanza episode: share or listen to an episode right from the show notes page — without being redirected to Apple Podcasts or Simplecast.

🔧 Enhancements

• Old nows are rendered as a feed of cards at the end of the page instead of being presented as inline content. That layout created an undesirable amount of scroll as “new nows” were being added, now looks cleaner.
• Add offline support through gatsby-plugin-offline: drop-in support for making a Gatsby site work offline and more resistant to bad network connections. It creates a service worker for the site and loads the service worker into the client.
• Strava is back in the footer: as an intermittent runner, sometimes I run a lot, sometimes I don’t run at all. Now it seems I’m on my way to run a lot again. Strava deserves to be back.
• Refactor a ton of code: improved image rendering, also made a few functions and GraphQL queries reusable across many components, and a (longer than expected) approach on how react-helmet was handling all the meta tags and SEO-related elements.
• Deprecate Netlify CMS: the idea of having a CMS to publish content sounds like a no-brainer. Yet if you get along with the text editor, for a personal blog, I realized, it does not make much sense.
• Deprecate Google Analytics: having it there in the first place was was a mistake in itself. This website exists as a way to share my thoughts and ideas, not because it wants to amass more users. Now collado.io is eating its own dog food. Now is tracking-free.