Continuing My Silent Live-Streaming Journaling Adventure
I'm live-streaming my journey of journaling and making the argument for keeping a single text file for life. I'm also creating a Github repo with code examples, watching cartoons with my kid, and making them food. I've written sample code and converted them into Python dict objects, and I now have a Jupyter Notebook to share with the community. Join me on my journey and explore the possibilities of journaling and coding!
Exploring the Possibilities of Journaling and Coding Through Live-Streaming My Journey
By Michael Levin
Friday, March 31, 2023
My journaling adventure continues. I make the argument for keeping a daily personal and professional journal with a vi-like editor, and keeping it as one single text file for life. Despite my liking to keep it a single file, it’ll split at least between personal and professional. The public one provides you with your own personal database from which you can “transform” websites into existence through such static site generator (SSG) like Github Pages, which is Jekyll, which is the Liquid template system in turn. It’s easier than it all sounds, and a great way to leverage what personal journaling you do that you feel so inspired as to publish. Sometimes we call it blogging, but I think that implies too much responsibility or something. I like to just think of it as journaling, and very freeform at that. Join me.
Hello World… again! This’ll be another silent one. Maybe I’ll get some software so you can hear the keys click. It’s so much pressure off of me by not doing the camera on my face or the microphone capture all the noises in the room. My kid doesn’t even need to know I’m streaming, haha! They just hear me typing away. Okay, let me get this chat thing right…
Now I’ll stay alert for that scroll-down icon that I didn’t notice on the last video. Glad I got some chat in with you there at the end. I find it irresistible to not just go ahead and stream while I “public” journal anyway. If the subject-matter is something I don’t mind talking about in public, then just talk out loud to yourself here and process your thoughts.
Have a lot going on. Do a lot of the chasing the white rabbit thing. Be the white rabbit, LOL! The Alice metaphors abound, but I also like layering in some of the Dorothy metaphors, because then I get to talk about Oz, which is almost MOZ, which is who I work for now, amazingly. So I’m taking it personal about producing some cool stuff sooner rather than later.
Blech, I’m not going to be able to let myself use the stringified JSON using Python’s triple-quote line-stacking trick. A better style is to keep the requests as nice clean Python dicts, and then flatten them to JSON string text last moment with the json.dumps() function.
Okay, now I have example dicts, or ed’s. A dict named ed will contain educational examples. I have the first done. I need to test it, really.
And there we have it. I have a system for putting all the Python examples into an actual dictionary of examples in a Notebook. Nice. This is a good plan to get a feel of the API with a semi-public audience. Nothing proprietary here. This is me just poking around an API and its documentation, making a Github repo as I do, in which you can partake. Speaking of which…
There. If you want this code, it’s at:
git clone git@github.com:miklevin/moz
I’m watching Craig of The Creek with my kid. What an excellent cartoon. Having some quality time here with my kid even as I type. We each do one additional thing to watching this cartoon we’ve already seen, probably more than once already. Someone poked in for a moment, haha!
Haha, that’s pretty cool. I don’t know how “expensive” any of this is API-wise, and I’ll make sure I don’t do it too much.
I need to clean up my language. It’s becoming too confusing.
See, that makes it safe to re-run without hitting the API over and over. You know you’re sitting on results. This is a really great way to take advantage of the Notebook environment.
Streaming again!
Making the kid some food… I’m not far, carrying laptop around… now we’re cooking. Oh, people! Okay, I’m picking up Moz code examples… Serving…
Okay… gotta feed the cats now… but contemplate the next one. It always works best if I copy the Python example code, which happens to be string JSON, which is not… uh, clean and beautiful maybe. I’m making them all actual Python dict objects.
Whoops a little wasted time there. Carrying on… I got ‘em all.
Well, that does it. It’s a Jupyter Notebook that touches each of the endpoints in the Jupyter Notebook. That’s a good starting point for future projects. And you can share in the resource.