I follow this person on Twitter, Stephanie Hurlburt. She is somewhere around 25-30 and is the cofounder of a Graphics startup called 'Binomial' which makes and sells an optimization algorithm to game dev companies. She regularly shares advice on Twitter on her negotiations. I think she's amazing because she genuinely seems to want to help people. One of the things she does is she has a twitter thread saying "If you are in a position to give help, post on your timeline every now and then. It helps a lot." and often retweets the people who offer their help to anybody who'd want it. Her tweets are an evergreen source of positivity on my feed.

I mention her because on that thread, a friendly Python programmer replied saying he was up to help people. I took up his offer for help last night.

I took his advice and started working with Flask today. Flask, at first glance seemed a lot like Django but as he mentioned, it is more lightweight.

I wasn't expecting it to be that lightweight. I'd spent two days on Django without realizing how I could execute python code. While reading the overview of Flask, it became clear in an hour. (Actually, maybe the two days of trudging around did help somewhat).

Flask was incredibly approachable to a newbie like me.

It's now the end of the day, and I now have this working -

There was a thread on HN recently. Ask HN: Why is nearing completion so demotivating? . I'm not near completion (by any definition of it) but the functionality shown above is a significant leap ahead in terms of where I was yesterday. Now that I've done it, now that I've been able to implement some part of it, the magic corresponding to those parts is... gone.

I still intend on finishing it. I want it to be as polished as every single Josh Comeau side project. Omg, he's so good at it.

I've not made much progress on the project since the last 5 hours. I think now is actually the perfect time for me to put on my Designer hat and decide what exactly I want my project to be.

My project currently uses Twitter API and Googlemaps API. Twitter API restricts to 300 requests every 15 minutes and the googlemaps API is at 2500 requests per day (and I can't use it from mid-June onwards because of policy changes). This is a really big constraint. I either need to figure out a way to bypass it or build it into my end-product. That requires me to think about it, think about what I want my project to eventually become.

I think I'll do that now.

(Oh and wow, I found this exists - https://twitter-replies.hoelz.ro/sehurlburt/889004724669661184/ - A way to search through that tweet by Stephanie I linked earlier. It's source code is available. I think I'll take a look at it to see how he engineers around it.)

Editing to include a link I just stumbled upon - What makes a project successful? . It's by the guy who wrote the above twitter reply tracker. Have only skimmed through it (will read it after I publish this while eating a cupful of Haleem).