Maker Journal July 2026

July was challenging.

I have been busy with this mega freelance project since last year, and one of the biggest milestones finally happened in July.

For the event, I built the main site, mobile app, and event app. The biggest pressure was making sure everything could survive the full 3-day event without any major issues, especially when everyone was using the system at the same time.

And somehow, I passed the challenge with flying colours.

Everything went smoothly. The system handled the traffic, with no major hiccups, and all the worrying before the event turned out to be a bit unnecessary.

After the event, I decided to take a week-long solo trip to another city in Malaysia.

No family schedule. No client rushing me. Just some proper me time.

I spent quite a lot of time doing nothing, exploring things I wanted to explore, working when I felt like working, and basically letting myself recharge.

It feels good.

I love my family, but I think I need this kind of me time once in a while too.

Funny enough, I still ended up building things during the trip.

I consolidated my whole product inventory, made some decisions on what I want to continue, what I should pause, and what I actually want to focus on next.

And thanks to Codex and all the usage resets, I managed to build and experiment with quite a lot of things during the trip as well.

Eventually I gave in and subscribed to ChatGPT Pro.

Hopefully I can make better use of it over the next few weeks instead of just using more tokens to build more random things. 😂

Looking back, July feels a bit different.

It feels like I finally closed the chapter that started in 2025.

And somehow, only now, my 2026 really starts.

A bit late.

But I guess better late than never.