With the beginning of the New Year, the time has come and the blog section was added to the website so that I can share more thoughts about different kinds of topics.
The plans are big, however, time is my limited resource. I’d love to tell you more about the interesting projects I was working on.
One such project was the automation of data processing from my smart scale. Briefly, the regular scale from a store was sharing the data with the app on my phone and synchronizing the data with the cloud. The idea of mine was, that I’d love to get daily updates of my weight and other stats measured by scale via mail report. I coded a Python script that scraped the data from the cloud, saved them into Google Sheets, and then the Javascript code snippet handled the reporting daily. Short note, the web scraping was necessary because the web app of my scale did not provide any API for my purpose.
Another project was a neural network that has been trained by using the evolutional algorithms to play Tetris. That was a project that I liked a lot and was proud of. The downside was that I refused to code the Tetris by myself so I used an open source version from GitHub which was not of good quality, so the final result of my project was influenced by the ‚shaky fundaments‘ it was built on.
The next project was a RSS reader. The idea appeared in my head many many years ago. It was in days when I did not even know there was such a thing as RSS. Also, I did not have much experience with Python back then. So I started coding a web scraper to get the news from online Media servers. After some effort I learned how to scrape and so on. Then I decided to hang up the project since I was not experienced enough to continue the development.
After a few years, I came back to the project armed with a knowledge of RSS technology. Suddenly web scraping was not a thing anymore and I developed a service that can gather News from the Media servers. The next part was to build a website that could present all the aggregated data. For such a thing I developed an API, that can serve the data for a website. The result was looking too good. Looking even ‚gooder‘ than was working. This helped me to extend my knowledge in full-stack development. Part of the project was a simple DB for storing the data.
I had to hang up the project once again, because of my limited knowledge of how to deploy such a service. This was also my first encounter with Microsoft Azure. Tried to deploy, succeeded partially, and could reach a website online. Success, however, the taste was sour-sweet.
Then after a few years of working with Azure services, I could deploy such a service with no issue because now I knew already how to integrate Azure Database with Web App and its API. And since the challenge is not eminent anymore, the project has lost its shine for me.
That’s how I got to my next project. The goal of such a project was to provide an API with data for every single country and its traffic information. I built a web app with an interactive map, where each country could be clicked on and provide information about the country’s speed limits, fines for traffic violations, maximum allowed alcohol levels, mandatory vehicle equipment, links to public transportation websites, links to the e-toll websites and many other useful information. This was a wonderful project that I enjoyed, especially because I had all the knowledge about how to develop such a product. The limitation of this project was legislation that does not force any national institutions to provide you with such information, so the amount of effort to gather the data for every single country every year is enormous.
Since I did not plan to make a commercial product out of that, I abandoned this project after finishing a working demo. This was a huge step for me because I was able to create a product from beginning to end, which helped a lot to gain confidence and self-esteem.