Building My Skills Through Work and Personal Projects

Hey LinkedIn, hope everyone’s doing great!

I wanted to share a quick update on what I’ve been up to over the past week. While I haven’t posted much recently, it’s been a productive time as I’ve been focusing on two key areas:

1. Work

Work has kept me on my toes lately. I’ve been tackling tasks and diving into solutions for ongoing projects. It’s been an exciting challenge, and honestly, there’s nothing more satisfying than solving problems and seeing progress unfold in real-time.

2. Personal Project: My JavaScript ORM (OrbDB)

On the personal side, I’ve been dedicating time to my JavaScript ORM project, OrbDB. It’s a lightweight Object Relational Mapper that I’ve been building to simplify database interactions, particularly with JSON and SQLite adapters. Over the weekend, I released a new version, which I’m really excited about.

The two major features I’ve been focusing on are:

• Data Sanitization: Ensuring that data passed through the ORM is clean and secure. For instance, I’ve added functionality to specifically ignore certain characters, such as . and @, when working with email fields. This precision ensures data integrity without over-sanitizing fields that require specific formatting.
• Hashing Utility: Adding a secure hashing feature to the ORM to make it easier for developers to implement cryptographic functions directly in their applications. It’s been a great way to integrate security best practices while making the ORM even more versatile.

This project has been a fantastic way to keep learning and upskilling myself. Every new feature or bug fix pushes me to think critically and explore better design patterns.

Why Personal Projects Matter

Working on OrbDB has reminded me of how important personal projects are for developers. They allow us to explore new technologies, experiment with solutions, and even make mistakes all in an environment where the only pressure is self-imposed. Plus, there’s something really rewarding about seeing your own tool evolve and grow over time.

I also want to give a shoutout to anyone balancing work and personal projects it’s not always easy, but it’s always worth it.

I’d love to hear about the projects you’ve been working on or the challenges you’ve overcome recently. Let’s connect, share ideas, and keep growing together.

Cheers, Tanaka

Interested in checking out my ORM? click here