1. AI4Devs Workshop

We finally been able to deliver this workshop to students and professionals who wanted to build AI agents from the ground up. It's more of a like a zero to hero experience.

2. Cebby

Cebby got an upgrade. New feature includes RSVP functionality. Useful for organizers who just want to organize RSVP and check-in functionalities. See latest changelog here ↗

3. OneCebby

OneCebby is a unified identity service powered by Logto that serves as your single sign-on (SSO) account for the entire Cebu tech community ecosystem. Instead of creating separate accounts for every tech app, website, event platform, or community service in Cebu, OneCebby gives you one unified identity across all participating platforms. Learn more about that here ↗

4. Preptember & Hacktoberfest

Next month is September and we're going to be real busy preparing for another round of Hacktoberfest this year. We did it with flying colors last year and we hope that we'll be able to do so once again this year.

1. 12in12.pro

I have not been able to update this site. Yet, I couldn't be more glad that others started to get involved and started to ship things. As a testament, see Joaquin Galang's LinkedIn post about his journey in 12in12.pro ↗.

2. Cebby

I'm excited to share that I'm starting to work once again on Cebby. You can check the public roadmap here ↗ and keep up to date.

3. OneCebby

I'm also excited to share that I'm starting to work on a new project called OneCebby. It's a simple auth service - an IDP and SSO provider that you can integrate to your app in a few minutes. With this, you don't need to deal with the complexities of authentication and authorization and just focus on the business logic of what you're building.

Check it out at OneCebby Demo App ↗

What's next?

1. I'll be speaking this coming April 19 in preparation for launching AI For Devs Workshop ↗. I'm excited to share my learnings and experiences with the community.
2. I'll be working on Cebby more and hopefully launch it in the coming months.
3. I'll be integrating OneCebby to Cebby and other projects that I'm working on.
4. I'll be doing a little bit of maintenance and improvement in 12in12.pro

I guess that's it for now! Thanks for catching up!

1. 12in12.pro

I've thought about this a lot last December and I after a lot of thought and finally having that clarity, I decided to give it a try! This was just a really personal project that I wanted to do but it seems a pretty lonely on my end but to be honest, seeing how others are also fighting their own battles and trying to ship something, I thought maybe that if there's like a community for this, it might be a good thing.

I have launched at the end of the month of January. Check it out at 12in12.pro ↗

2. Cebby

Honestly, I didn't thought that Cebby will go this far. It was just a simple idea that I had in mind last Cebu Hacktoberfest 2024, and it grow up to be something that I didn't expect.

The community is amazing! I've met a lot of people and they are all super supportive. I've learned a lot from them and I'm still learning.

Check it out at getcebby.com ↗

Here's a list of things that we're shipped for Cebby.

1. Calendar Integration - You don't have to keep visiting www.getcebby.com ↗ to never miss a tech event in Cebu! We've added calendar integration so that all events in Cebby syncs into your favorite calendar app. Learn more about that calendar update here ↗

2. A New Landing Page - Today if you go to www.getcebby.com ↗, you'll be greeted with a landing page that will hopefully give you all the information you need about what Cebby is all about and how it could add some value in your life. View more about that here ↗

3. Small Calendar Update - Single events on a given day gets a boost as they appear more prominently on the calendar. Learn more about that update here ↗

4. Cebby reaches top spot in Google Search and other search engines - If you search Cebby before, you'll not find it on the first page of Google. But today, if you search Cebby, you'll see it on the first page of Google. This could only mean that it started to recognize this as a brand by itself. Learn more about this exciting news here ↗

5. UI Updates - Happenign Now, Quick Nav Filters, Search - UI/UX improvements to make the app experience better. Learn more about those updates here ↗

Exploring PWAs for a Better User Experience with Cebby!

Yesterday morning, I dove into an experiment with Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) to scratch a personal itch—creating a smoother, more reliable experience for Cebby users in the future.

Why not just stick with a regular web app? 🤔 Here’s the thing: imagine you’re at an event, reaching for your phone to pull up the event info or scan a QR code (especially because someone asked for it 😅). We all try to prepare by taking screenshots or saving details in advance, but that’s not really the experience we deserve, is it?

A Web App Isn’t Enough… Here’s Why:

With a traditional web app, you’re constantly tethered to the internet. And here in the Philippines, consistent, stable mobile data isn’t something we can always count on. Plus, creating a dedicated mobile app for Cebby would just add another app on people’s phones that might not get used often. So, why not meet users halfway?

That’s where a PWA comes in. It’s a website with all the reliability, offline capabilities, and functionality of a native mobile app—without the extra downloads or dependency on internet access.

The User Experience I’m Envisioning:

1. Open Cebby – Just like a website, but it loads instantly.
2. Browse Events – Check out upcoming events, and RSVP directly or follow a link to the host’s ticket page.
3. Store Essential Assets – Important assets like QR codes or event details save to your device, so you have everything you need, even offline. At the Event: When you arrive, you can launch Cebby, pull up the event details or QR code without internet, and you’re all set!

This is the kind of experience I want to create for Cebby users: a platform that works reliably anytime, anywhere, and frees users from data worries. Because good design cares about what you need, before you even realize it.

Let’s make Cebby a reliable companion for every event, no matter where you are! 🚀

Try PWA Cebby today

https://pwa.getcebby.com ↗

#ProgressiveWebApp #Cebby #UserExperience #TechForGood #EventsPH #OfflineAccess

Added capability to subscribe to calendar updates so that you can get notified when there are new events straight to your calendar. This works for Google Calendar, Outlook, and iCal.

See latest commit here ↗

And see it in action here ↗

Yesterday, I just couldn't help myself but to spin up a Hacktoberfest website for the JavaScript Cebu community. And boy, I did! It took me a couple of hours but I'm glad I was able to do it.

Now and moving forward, the time and effort by community members will be monumented here.

Check it out at hacktoberfest.jscebu.org ↗

Accepting also contributions for the website itself! See the repo here ↗

Asked a few friends in the community to help test the app. I already had a hint that the FB App might need to be verified and so indeed. I am patiently waiting for the review so I can proceed with the next steps.

After this, I also need to apply for Access Verification (you could see it in the screenshot above).

I don't think I'll update the web app anytime soon. I'm going back to focus on the backend and fix some issues and improve some areas that I think needs to be improved. A couple of things that I want to do:

1. Fix the attribution of events to the correct account
2. Support for multiple accounts for a given event
3. Probably switch to database functions instead of edge functions for the automated initiating process

That's it for now. See yah!

One step closer to getting everything automated for the Facebook Events service of this events aggregator that I'm building.

• feat: initial authorizaton of accounts ↗
• improvements using long lived tokens ↗

PS: Go to https://events.dorelljames.dev ↗ to try it out. 😉

I have successfully completed the Event Aggregation service, which currently fetches events from Facebook based on the accounts stored in the database. While serverless functions are familiar to me, Supabase's choice of Deno as their runtime provided a valuable learning opportunity.

The service operates on a 15-minute schedule, checking for new events and saving them to the database using the pg_cron and pg_net extensions. The cron job triggers a Supabase edge function to fetch events from Facebook, and for each account, it calls the edge function to retrieve and store the events in the database.

See the reference commit here ↗

I finally had the time to work on this idea of mind, an aggregation of tech events in Cebu.

There's two parts of this project:

1. Event Aggregation: This service automates the process of fetching the events from sources, eg: Facebook, Eventbrite, Meetup, etc. It then stores the events in a database and makes them available via an API.
2. Web App: This is a simple web app to view the events. It allows you to filter the events by category, date, and location. It's public and will allow people to see the events in Cebu as well as organizers to authorize (in Facebook's case) their apps to sync their events to the site.

View repo here ↗

Today I added a HubSpot integration to the site. This will allow me to keep track of people who sign up for updates. As I start in this journey, I want to be able to keep track of all the people who are interested in what I'm doing.

I created this site to start documenting my experiences about all the stuff I'm working on. Today, I'm still not so sure about whether this is a good thing or not but hey, I'm putting it out here anyways. As a monument to getting started, you'll find above the very first screenshot of this site. Stay tuned for more updates!