New Projects
I’ve been trying to find some small projects to practice coding and infrastructure knowledge. I think I have two new ideas that are not too complicated for one person, but complex enough that I’d get to flex a few different engineering muscles. Here are the two ideas:
In interviewing, I find that while some recruiters use services like Calendly, others will simply ask via email a question like “when are you available next week”. Answering these requests ends up being a bit of a translation exercise of my calendar to text. It doesn’t take long, maybe a few minutes, but it feels like using an app is a bit more efficient. I was thinking, would it be possible for a simple algorithm to turn my free/busy information into text? That seems like a reasonable problem, not unlike a random coding challenge you might find on HackerRank or some such. Giving it real data wouldn’t be too bad either, because I’m sure there’s a Google API call just to grab free/busy information. I’m thinking if I can code it up in Python, then I could even make a nice little serverless app that should be easy to call with a few parameters and will return some text.
Sometimes I’ve found that if I want to make a change in my personal life or habits (like when I go to bed, how I structure my day, etc.) I find that it’d hard to keep track of the effects of such a change. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to send myself a few automated surveys while I make a change to gather a small bit of data? There are certainly survey makers out there, but there isn’t (as far as I know) anything that will setup a data gathering plan or send reminders or things like that. I think that could be an interesting infrastructure question. Maybe there’s even a neat little microservice architecture to build out for solving thigs.
Either of these I think is probably not much more than a few days or a weeks worth of work. Both seem like they wouldn’t save that much time for their specific tasks in the short term, but could do so in the long term. They would both be chances to practice a few app building skills, and maybe could even be something worth sharing to others in the long run.
