DEV Community: Hery

Why Competing on Google Feels Like Fighting a Losing Battle 🥀

Hery — Fri, 11 Jul 2025 17:11:46 +0000

I’m not losing to better content, better products, or better services.
I’m losing to bigger wallets.

Their brand is everywhere.
Their domain authority crushes everything.
Their SEO budget equals my entire year’s revenue.

It’s not just frustrating — it’s demoralizing.

How are we supposed to win when the rules keep changing, and the game is rigged against the small players?

If you're going through the same thing, just know this: you're not alone.
We're not bad at SEO. We're just not backed by money.

Have you experienced the same thing?
Drop a comment — I’d love to hear how you’re navigating this mess.

Hello dev.to! My First Article – Who I Am and What I Build

Hery — Sun, 22 Jun 2025 18:02:03 +0000

Hello dev.to! My First Article – Who I Am and What I Build

Hi everyone! 👋

This is my very first article on dev.to, and I’m excited to finally introduce myself to this amazing community of developers, makers, and tech enthusiasts.

👨‍💻 Who Am I?

My name is Heri, and I’m a passionate developer, entrepreneur, and lifelong learner. I work mostly with:

JavaScript / Node.js

PHP (CodeIgniter)

SQL Server

React (for frontend projects)

Aside from coding, I also love exploring automation, building real-time systems with WebSockets, and integrating APIs for digital products like top-ups, billing systems, and more.

I run a project called MAXsi.ID, where I provide digital services like mobile top-ups, bill payments, voucher sales, and even smart farming tools.

🚀 Why I’m Here

I’ve been reading articles on dev.to for a while, and I’ve learned so much from this community. Now, I want to give back — by:

Sharing my coding experiences and bugs I’ve fixed

Writing about building real-world systems in JavaScript & PHP

Exploring automation workflows for business use cases

Discussing farming tech and how I merge tech with agriculture

🧠 Topics I Plan to Write About

In future posts, I want to cover:

How I automated payment processing using WebSockets + MSSQL

SEO-friendly content generation for static sites

Smart farming using ESP32 + MQTT + Node.js

How I built a live product dashboard with React and Tailwind

Developer tips for working with APIs and scheduled cron tasks

💬 Let’s Connect!

I’m always open to collaborate or learn from others. If you’re working on:

DevOps for digital businesses

Automating backend workflows

Farm tech or IoT + agriculture

Or just want to talk code...

...feel free to comment, follow me, or say hey! 🙌

Thanks for reading my first article. I’m really looking forward to sharing more and being part of this community.

See you in the next post! 🚀

What I Learned Building a Real-Time Pulsa & Top-Up Backend with Node.js

Hery — Sun, 22 Jun 2025 05:56:04 +0000

What I Learned Building a Real-Time Pulsa & Top-Up Backend with Node.js

This isn't a tutorial — just a story of how I ended up building a backend system to handle real-time prepaid top-ups (pulsa, internet data, utility tokens, etc.) using plain Node.js and WebSocket.

The system is live, used daily by users, and processes transactions through bank transfer detection + external API triggers. Here's how it evolved, and what I learned from the process.

🧹 Context

In my region, prepaid services like mobile data, electricity tokens (PLN), and even BPJS (national health insurance) payments are still very much in demand — and mostly processed manually.

I wanted to build something that can:

Accept top-up requests from users
Detect payment via bank mutation (MSSQL-based)
Send that payment to a remote gateway
Do all this in real-time with feedback to the frontend

💻 The Stack

Nothing fancy. I started with:

Node.js — to handle backend logic
WS (WebSocket) — for bi-directional real-time updates
MSSQL — to query latest transfers/mutations
Filesystem — queueing requests via JSON files
Axios — to send top-up commands to the gateway

The queue system is very basic: JSON files are dropped into a req/ folder, then scanned every minute for matching payments.

🔄 Real-Time Looping

Each file contains a request like this:

{
  "type": "MAXsi.ID TOPUP",
  "kode": "IND10",
  "tujuan": "0812700313",
  "harga": 10313,
  "nama": "Rizky",
  "bank": "BRI",
  "deviceId": "client-xyz"
}

Once a match is found in the bank mutation table (e.g. amount + name in keterangan), the system triggers a request to an external API (in my case, OtomaX or a similar system).

The client is updated in real-time through the WebSocket connection.

🧠 Things That Surprised Me

🧵 WebSocket is underrated. For transactional systems, it's way better than polling.
⚖️ Parsing human-entered notes is unreliable. You'd be surprised how many ways someone can type "Rizky".
↺ Retry logic matters. Sometimes network flukes cause a miss, and the system needs to be idempotent.
📀 File-based queuing works, if you're disciplined. For low-traffic systems, it's dead simple and avoids DB overhead.

🧪 Bank Mutation Matching Logic

This is the trickiest part. I check:

amount >= harga
keterangan LIKE %nama%
and timestamp is within ±45 mins

Even with that, I added safeguards like “processed files” tracker to avoid duplicate transactions.

✍️ Closing Thoughts

This system isn't perfect. But it's been running daily, reliably handling:

Pulsa top-ups
Token listrik (prepaid electricity)
Bill payments like BPJS and PBB

I learned a lot from this — especially about simplifying automation. Sometimes, you don't need Kubernetes or Kafka. Just a folder, a WebSocket, and some console.log.

If you're building anything in this space — fintech, automation, hybrid local-digital systems — I'd love to hear how you tackle these things.