Now — June 2025 Recap

This post is my first now page article, and a look back at what I've been up to this month.

✨ Highlights

This month the theme has been revisiting and updating personal projects. Some that I hadn't worked on in 8 years!

AI is front and center at work right now. My projects this month have all related to logged-in customer navigation and AI experiences. I feel lucky to be working for a company that is embracing AI tools for developers and applying AI to products.

I've also started using Cursor both at home and at work instead of VS Code, and have been using it to improve the code coverage for this project and the API behind it.

Finally — I'm preparing for a short vacation coming up next month. In July I'll spend 5 days in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.

🛠️ What I Worked On

Reviving teachersalary.info

Early in the month, I noticed that teachersalary.info was receiving more traffic than I expected — more than this blog even! — and so I spent the first time in 8 years updating the project. I published a blog post sharing the project.

Published a new Steam widget to my home page

I've have a PR staged that explored connecting to the Steam API, and in June 2025 I deployed that and published a new Steam widget on my home page that renders the top-ten games I've played overall, by hour, as a table, and links to my Steam profile to review the rest.

I've been chatting with a few people about the project and how it could be improved, by growing the visualizations and data sets beyond this first example. If you have any ideas or feedback, let me know.

Replaces TravisCI and CircleCI with GitHub Actions

Across all of my projects, I've been working to replace CircleCI and TravisCI with GitHub Actions. I can drive my entire CI pipeline for most of my projects using entirely GitHub Actions and don't need the complexity of the additional services.

Updates to my Personal API

I've been putting more attention into my personal API behind this website, metrics.chrisvogt.me. I added the first set of unit tests using vitest, migrated from Firebase Functions v1 to v2, and made changes to optimize my responses and improve my site's performance.

🎹 Music & Creativity

This month I added several new songs to my practice rotation and updated https://repertoire.chrisvogt.me to include them. Here's what I've been playing:

SongArtist
Twilight ZoneAriana Grande
The Way We WereBarbara Streisand
BrokenLovelytheband
TouchDaft Punk
I Think They Call This LoveElliot James Reay
Golden HourJVKE
Pink Pony ClubChappell Roan
Till Forever Falls ApartAshe & FINNEAS

📚 What I Read

This month I read 49 pages (16%) of Flowers for Algernon. The bulk of my reading is done while in transit and I'm working on habits to spend time reading outside of that.

💭 Final Thoughts

This is the first time I've used this format, and have published a now page. When I create my next one, I'll move this article to a new location to archive it.