THE 30 DAY STREAK
The day was 27th January 2016. Scrolling down the medium feed, I came across an article by some developer I am grateful to now who had had this idea of writing code every day.
Wind blows! Thunder claps! Revelation strikes!
An aspiring dev and soon to be CTO of [a-z0–9 ]* I had an epiphany.
Enough is enough!
No more time shall now be squandered!
And so I embarked on a journey of epic proportions.
Coding. Gitting. Committing. Everyday.
You know how the price fluctuates on amazon, right? And we in India never want to miss out on the best deals. I am an avid reader of books from Plato to Schopenhauer, from Jane Austen to Dan Brown to the greatly missed Harper Lee. I needed to know when the price was the lowest reaching a threshold which allowed poor me with no income sources to buy it.
Viola! Amazon-Updates was born! A simple web scraper which combines with the power of the UNIX crontab to send me an e-mail of the current price all the products that I have added to my wishlist. Besides the application is multithreaded so it works really fast.
Got me to buy ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ @ Rs 127 instead of the usual ~Rs 250. Books and coding are bliss!
The obvious thought was, “What if I missed a day? I’ll be damned!”. Come great ideas to the rescue. You know how all this competitive coding fever abounds at IIIT, and so a couple of submissions on Codeforces, Codechef, etc are mandatory. If somehow, these could get pushed to GitHub automatically, the streak will continue. Viola! Codechef-Gitter was born.
What is does is that it saves all your accepted submissions made on Codechef locally, and then pushes them to GitHub. Again add with it the UNIX crontabs and it becomes the perfect hack.
Besides coding it was fun. Right from the conception of the idea to the very execution to the point where I realised why OOP code is much better than going about in a procedural way. Also used a new language viz Python27.
Haven’t had the need to use this to add to the streak though.
3. D3 Visuals
Working for a local NGO, compiling data about volunteer attendance, and an attraction towards charts, graphs etc. I went on ahead to extract these charts from the original codebase and to make improvements in them. Will continue working on these as and when new ideas come.
4. Stack-overflow Desktop Notification
This is the one I like the best thanks to a colleague and his idea. What this does is it shows you a little desktop notification on the upper-right corner of your screen containing info about the latest question asked on your chosen tags on stackoverflow. Great idea! But still needed improvements like
- Being platform independent.
- Clicking the bubble to open the link.
- A dismiss button.
Which were all added to it.
It works like a charm. You know how being at the right place at the right time is so beneficial, or being the first to reach a party means you can have more snacks and so on. Similarly being the first to view and answer a question has its benefits. This made me earn 114 reputation in the last week.
5. Contest Desktop Notifications
Let’s face it! Having to drag you cursor to the chrome extension and clicking is not for the lazy. I am the lazy.
This script shows a pop-up with information about the currently running coding contest from many popular platforms. But this isn’t over yet. Add it with the custom bindings in autohotkey and there you have what you always wanted. Less dragging the cursor and more stroking the keys.
6. Others
And then there were many other things. PRs, reporting issues, small scripts, scraped projects etc. Everything helped in learning.
All in all, days are productive, nights are more, and I am happy. Developing something, learning, is true love!
Although ideas have become scarce lately, I will do my best to continue the streak, being all motivated and stuff.
Cheers!
So long!
Fork Me: https://github.com/aedorado
Follow Me: https://twitter.com/AnuragElDorado
Special thanks to Pratyush Singh for proof-reading this post.
