July 2025 Birth Month Recap

Here comes the end of July 2025, which was a busy month with multiple major things going on for me.

Firstly, July is the birth month of both my father and I. We both had nice birthday celebration at home in this July.

In my case, I got to enjoy roti canai as lunch in a local café, buy a cute banana plushie as my birthday present this year, and then enjoy tiramisu as my birthday cake at home.

In early July, I bought myself an early birthday present in the form of a new gaming laptop, an Asus TUF Gaming A15, and took the opportunity to switch to Arch Linux as my daily Linux distribution. You can learn more about my new laptop from my previous blog post.

Now that I have been using my new gaming laptop and Arch Linux for almost a month, I can comfortably say that I am happy with them. Between Arch Linux and KDE Plasma as my desktop environment, I finally have a daily drive operating system I enjoy immensely, as it allows me to assemble my personal computer operating system from the ground up, and having tons of options to customise my desktop, such as using the Catppuccin colour scheme in pretty much everything, including the desktop environment itself.

Aside from my birthday, the biggest event in my July 2025 was freeCodeCamp's 2025 Summer Hackathon, which took place in the freeCodeCamp Discord server throughout July. I applied in June, and then got selected as a participant in the hackathon.

I applied to participate because I wanted to gain more experience in building programming projects. I started my journey to teach myself web development beyond a hobby with freeCodeCamp, and July happens to be my birth month as well, so it is meaningful to me to gain the opportunity to participate in freeCodeCamp’s hackathon. It helps that their community is queer-inclusive too, with the community manager, Naomi Carrigan, being transfeminine herself. This freeCodeCamp hackathon was not my first time participating in a team software project, but it was my first time participating in an event that officially calls itself a hackathon.

Hackathon participants were placed in different groups based on time zones, and each team was assigned with different full-stack web app projects with a specific theme. My team consisted of people based in Asia, while our project is a daily affirmation platform.

I volunteered to manage our team project's front end since that is my speciality, though I also contributed to our decision to build our project with Flask since a few of us, myself included, have had experience with it. In addition, as there were a few members in my team were beginners to coding and programming, so with Flask being based on Python, a beginner-friendly programming language, and the Jinja template engine being essentially HTML with Python sprinkled in, we hoped to choose to build in a tech stack that is approachable to programming beginners. I also encouraged the use of vanilla CSS and JavaScript rather than using frameworks because I am a firm believer in learning the fundamentals. Furthermore, through my hackathon team's project, I got introduced to uv, a Python package manager, which was what we used to run our Flask project.

All hackathon team's projects went into code freeze on July 28, coincidentally my birthday, and each team has been scheduled to present our projects to Naomi, the freeCodeCamp community manager and host of this hackathon, in August, then Naomi will present our hackathon projects to the rest of the freeCodeCamp community.

The main lesson I learned from being the front end leader of my hackathon team project is that being a project manager means you will likely spend as much time in organising and overseeing your team and project as writing code. I contributed a fair amount of code to our project, but I also spend much time in reviewing teammates' pull requests, as well as planning and assigning tasks to teammates. Occasionally when I reviewed teammates' pull requests, I also offered suggestions for improving their code based on web standards such as web accessibility.

My team could not manage to finish everything we planned to do, but we managed to implement the main features of our project. Given the fact that we work on this project while juggling with other things in our daily life, we were glad to have done our project as much as we could. The primary goal of this hackathon is to learn about working on a software project in a team, as being a software developer is not just about coding skills, but also problem-solving skills, organisation skills, and in group projects, communication skills.

Update, 12 August 2025: On 9 August 2025 morning in my time zone, my hackathon team presented our work with Naomi, and it went well. Naomi was impressed by how our project turned out, especially for one that was developed within four weeks in our spare time.

Some of my team, myself included, are interested in continue to work on our project to improve it, and since the hackathon channels in freeCodeCamp's Discord server will be removed, my team has created our own private Discord server to continue our collaboration in our project.

After a busy month, I intend to relax a bit. In particular, after spending a month in working on a team software project, I am ready to return to my personal projects, such as my websites.

I am still waiting for my local campus of 42 the computer science school to start their core curriculum. The campus has planned to hold a new intake of 4-week bootcamp starting from mid-August in hopes to gather more students who will pass the bootcamp and thus be qualified for the core curriculum, so I anticipate that I will need to wait until near the end of this year at the earliest for the core curriculum to begin.