DevLog – 250426: Closing Out April Builds

Wrapping up the first full month of my Astro site, I've hit my Netlify build minutes limit — but it marks a great milestone. Here's the full summary of my April projects and progress.

Today, I officially reached the end of my Netlify build minutes for April, which means I won’t be able to post any new devlogs until May. This marks the completion of my first full month running my Astro-powered site, and it has been an incredibly productive start.

April Accomplishments

Here's a recap of everything built and launched this month:

• Completed and launched my Astro homepage with custom terminal-style theming.
• Created the DevLog HTML template standard to unify my blog posts into a terminal-themed aesthetic.
• Deployed my working AI chatbot (Arynwood Robot) built with Gradio and Hugging Face Inference API.
• Started customizing and modifying my chatbot’s app.py and exploring feeding it custom documents.
• Successfully built and launched my first 3D Three.js Gallery online using CDN imports, overcoming CSP and module errors.
• Started implementing loading optimizations and preview render improvements for faster gallery load times.
• Learned practical GitHub hosting workflows for my web projects and blog updates.
• Documented all technical hurdles in daily devlogs to create a professional programming portfolio.

Challenges

Despite the wins, there were challenges:

• Hugging Face free tier limits made scaling my AI experiments difficult.
• My MacBook’s RAM and processing speed limited heavier tasks like model finetuning and Blender 3D edits.
• Running out of Netlify build minutes earlier than expected showed how active I was — but also a limit I'll plan for next month.

What's Next

May will bring a new chapter of development goals:

• Optimize Three.js gallery layout and mobile performance.
• Expand the chatbot features, possibly experimenting with local models or self-hosted AI options.
• Continue migrating older devlogs from HTML into Astro components for long-term scalability.
• Balance all of it with the big milestone — my daughter is almost crawling! Time management will be even more important as I work around her exciting growth milestones.

Final Thoughts

April 2025 was the month I officially put myself back into serious coding mode after a long hiatus. Between web development, AI exploration, and 3D graphics, I rebuilt the starting point of a real technical portfolio. No matter how fast or slow next month goes, the foundation has been set. Now it’s time to build on it.

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