It’s been a while since my last post. I’ve been busy — worried, working, happy, learning, and also building.

Some of the big updates I can share are:

I got a Co-op position with the Government of Manitoba! I was so excited and happy!

My wife and I are expecting our first child. A lot of joy and a bit of pressure — but mostly joy.

For this post, though, I want to showcase a present I made for my wife for her birthday. She was in Ecuador at that time (August), and since I couldn’t take her out for dinner or give her any fancy gift, I decided to build a web page with some interactivity — something she could enjoy and revisit anytime.

Overkill? Maybe

I know — building this in Next.js was a bit much for a birthday present. But I wanted to keep practicing with the framework. I used Tailwind for styling, hardcoded arrays 😁, and spent most of my time perfecting the balloon logic (especially at the last minute 🤫).

The interactivity was my main focus. My wife isn’t particularly into tech, so I wanted it to be fun and engaging from the very beginning.

Mobile Display

At first, I planned to fill the desktop screen with a billion balloons. But I soon realized that on mobile, the same number was way too much. And removing them on mobile was a bigger challenge — on desktop, I just had to hover over the balloons to make them move, but on mobile, I had to drag each balloon individually 🤪.

It ended being a success, my nephews helped her to get rid of the balloons.

It made me wonder: what if I built a site where anyone could make their own little web surprise for someone special?

Maybe one day.