June 2025 Recap

June arrived with a stack of neglected side projects and no excuse not to address them. teachersalary.info had been drawing a quiet thousand-plus visitors a month—more traffic than this blog—for eight years without a line of updated code. The Steam widget had been staged in a PR for weeks. CircleCI and TravisCI were running parallel pipelines that had diverged enough to count as archaeology. All of it landed in June, which still left room for six Pride parties, a first batch of home-brewed Cascade IPA bottled just in time to hand out at one of them, and the beginning of a vinyl habit I owe entirely to my friends.

🤖 AI at Work

AI is front and center at work: all of my June projects tied into logged-in customer navigation and building AI-powered experiences. At home I've switched from VS Code to Cursor and have been using it to improve test coverage on this site and its API.

🌴 Upcoming Travel

July brings a short trip to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.

🛠️ What I Worked On

Reviving teachersalary.info

At the beginning of the month, I noticed that teachersalary.info was quietly receiving more traffic than my blog — which surprised me! I hadn't touched it in 8 years, so I spent some time refreshing the project and published a blog post about the work.

New Steam Widget

In June, I launched a Steam widget on my home page. It pulls in my top ten most-played games (by hours logged) using the Steam API. I'd had the code staged in a PR for a while — and finally shipped it!

I've been chatting with others about ways to evolve it — maybe including additional visualizations and expanding the dataset. If you have ideas or feedback, I'd love to hear them.

Migrated CI to GitHub Actions

Across all of my projects, I've replaced CircleCI and TravisCI with GitHub Actions. It simplified my pipelines a lot — I no longer need the extra tooling, and everything runs through GitHub now.

Personal API Upgrades

My personal API, which powers this site, got some love this month:

• ✅ Added first unit tests (using Vitest)
• 🚀 Migrated from Firebase Functions v1 → v2
• ⚡ Optimized API responses to improve site performance

🎉 Pride Events

I went to six Pride and birthday parties in June — all coordinated through Partiful, which has become the most-used app among my friends for organizing events the last couple years. (I also used it for my birthday party.)

💿 I've Started Collecting Vinyl

Vinyl has taken over my friend group — everyone's talking about new records they're spinning, and I've caught the bug too.

I haven't bought a record player yet (holding out for a sale), but I've started collecting LPs anyway. I usually bring them over to my neighbor's place when we hang out and listen together.

I also discovered Discogs and started tinkering with their API. I plan to build a widget to display my vinyl collection on my home page soon.

🍺 Brewing Beer

Over my birthday weekend in May, I brewed my first-ever batch of beer — a single-hop Cascade IPA. By June 28, it was bottled and ready to drink: a Pride beer! 🏳️‍🌈🍻

🌱 Indoor Gardening Experiments

I've been experimenting with indoor gardening lately, mostly to learn how to keep things alive and growing in a smaller space.

It all started with an AeroGarden I picked up on sale — then I accidentally propagated a philodendron! I left a clipping in a vase, and before I knew it, roots had formed. Now it's a whole new plant.

🎹 Music & Creativity

I added several new songs to my practice rotation this month and updated repertoire.chrisvogt.me with the latest additions:

📚 What I Read

I made progress on Flowers for Algernon this month — I’m now on page 226 of 311 (about 73%). I still do most of my reading while traveling, but I’ve been trying to carve out more quiet time at home to read.

📸 Favorite Photos from June

Here are a few of my favorite shots from June.