Day 31 of the forty-seventh loop

I could barely get up in the morning at around 10. I had gone to bed close to 2 a.m.—I worked late into the night and could not stop. The new chat clearly codes much better. Of course, without a programmer’s help it still cannot do anything serious yet, because it makes many mistakes and constantly needs correction, but it really does code better.

I built a mobile web app that lets you keep a structured diary with simple tag-based entries attached to different event categories. I am making the app multi-user and secure; no personal data is stored on the server in any form. In fact, the only identifier I generate comes from an email plus a secret salt and is then hashed. Authentication works through one-time passwords sent by email, and I also wired in Apple-style features such as email password autofill.

Here is how the app works: you log in, and by default you are offered a standard set of entry categories represented by nice-looking emoji—Well-being, Sleep, Food, Drink, Work, Finance, and so on. You can customize the categories any way you want; I personally left only the emoji. Then you are shown a day view with a set of basic categories that can easily be changed, a text field for entering notes, and buttons for deleting and sorting. Everything is extremely simple. When you enter a note and press Enter, that note turns into a tag for the category and is written to your personal dictionary. After that, you can choose values from that dictionary.

The whole point is that the app works simply and extremely fast. You collect different events that are stored within a day as either fuzzy or exact values—up to you. Then, once you accumulate enough data, the interesting part begins: we run AI to identify dependencies among different events within a day and across time. We will look for patterns. For example, if you went to bed late, your mood is bad the next day. In short, I’m playing around and practicing. I’ll publish it soon.

In the morning, while the kids were screaming and my wife was handling household stuff, I selfishly kept creating =) Then I helped a bit, made lunch, took a walk with Leah, put her down for a nap, and got in some decent Hebrew practice—it is hard going, but I won’t give up. Twenty straight days already.

After Leah woke up, we had lunch and went to return the sneakers Masha bought last week. Just as I suspected, we got stuck at the mall. On the plus side, we ate crepes at Teremok there, and Leah and I stared at the figure skaters on the ice. Then I relaxed a bit in a massage chair. The mechanical rollers worked over my back and butt pretty hard, and my body still hurts a little now.

In the evening I ran to the pharmacy, then sat down to code. Improving the app. Went to bed closer to 1 a.m.