I used Tailwind CSS to create the templates that I eventually rendered via Flask.

here's what it ended up looking like -

While I'm proud of having managed to do it, I'm also extremely embarrassed about the design. It's awful. I am finding it extremely difficult to balance both design and code at the same time.

I could see a lot of ways to move forward with making it function better but it felt like an uphill battle that nobody cared about.

Instead, I looked towards deploying. I cut a corner here and used Localtunnel. I didn't learn anything but I was serving the local server over the internet. It worked. I was able to share what I was doing with a friend who had no idea about it and I got a 'Awesome! u could go further and use some geo-json data to plot it on a map with heatmaps, maybe. Another library integration.'

Idk, that kind of blew all the air out of the balloon. It made me realize that the end-output looked extremely small compared to all the work I felt I'd put in.

I took a break from it after that.

I started a newsletter - http://tinyletter.com/shardo and sent the first email out.

I like going through personal websites of people. Of late, I've been finding a lot of websites by going through the twitter bios of people I find on Twitter.

I'd also heard the news that StumbleUpon was closing.

I wanted to make Stumbleupon but for links found in the profiles of people that somebody on twitter follows.

Extracting the urls was easy, I already had the file for all of the people I follow which in turn contained an array full of their friend objects. The twist was that although they were displayed in the correct manner, they actual links were shortened and of the form "https://t.co/$randomstring".

Took me two days to find a way to extract the actual url from them, one to try to avoid the problem and the other to sit down and force myself to find a solution to it.

I ended up porting an existing script from python2 to python3 (I say 'I' but I only really ran a 2to3.py script that did everything for me).

I ran the script over a friend's account and now have 643 links I need to go through. That's just for a single friend, I can't imagine how many links I'll get if I traverse the entire database.

I'm running low on Energy. ~10 days ago, I remember being extremely enthusiastic and raring to understand the Python script that Karpathy had written regardless of the difficulties that might lay ahead. Right now, I'm not particularly enthusiastic about trying to fix the new issues that are arising. Fatigued might be a good description. Burn out?

Aren't burnouts treated with off-days where you recharge your energy? I actually did have a couple of off-days in between. FWIW, I think they did help but not enough. Ever since I've gotten home, I realize that in pursuit of these coding-projects I've neglected other activities and I think that's showing.

I only have 30 days at home before I'm uprooted and thrust into a completely new environment but I think it's best if I figure something that works for me by then.

The plan for the next couple of days is to work on this StumbleTwitter idea.

Until next time.