August Flanagan

A couple of weeks ago I had an idea for a perfect weekend coding project. My “weekend project” actually ended up taking me more like 30 hours to build. You see, I’m a noob, and I’m still pretty slow.

I’ve been learning to code for about 6 months now, and have developed a real liking (dare I say passion) for it. Of course 6 months is nothing, and I’m about as far from a savant as you can get. So far I’ve learned just enough to be able to actually start building things on my own, even if they suck. I’ve also learned just enough to know that I don’t know very much yet.

With that said I present my little app – www.lifechore.com

Premise: A simple way to remind yourself to do those really, really small tasks that you always put off (canceling a gym membership, calling a relative, etc.).

Function: Sign up by entering your email and a list of “lifechores” that you want to be reminded to do. You’ll get a daily email reminding you of what you have to do. You can add/remove items from your list by replying to the daily email (instructions in footer).

Why Build It: There are a lot of task management apps out there, and they might all be better at solving this problem, but I don’t use any of them. I don’t really know why that is, maybe I’m just lazy… But, I do use email (like my gmail is constantly open), so a simple reminder everyday will always be right in front of me.

I’ve also had a real desire to write an “email app” for a couple of months now. I use the term to describe an app that users interact with through sending and receiving emails. I’m not sure why I’ve wanted to do this, but I’ve been brainstorming ideas on what I could do to satisfy this desire. This was the first one that actually seemed to make any sense at all.

How I Built It: Python + Google App Engine

My first interaction with “real” code (i.e. more than HTML/CSS) was when I started working on Lenguajero with my partner. Natalie, my partner, chose to build Lenguajero on top of the Google App Engine mainly as an experiment, and chose to do so using Python. So, I’ve been around Python for longer than I’ve actually been writing code.

I first started learning Python with Zed Shaw’s Learn Python The Hard Way (or at least what there was of it 6 months ago), and then I wrote a few small scripts/programs in Python after going through it.

For the past 3 months I’ve been working in Ruby on Rails, so it was nice to go back to Python after gaining a better understanding of the basics and having a better $global understanding of how the pieces all fit together.

However, the real reason I used GAE was the Mail API. It made it really easy to start sending and receiving email, and since that is the basis of the app it was kind of a no-brainer.

Future Plans: I’ve been using my own service for about a week now. I also showed it to about 10 friends, and a few of them are also using it.

The truth is it is not as useful as I thought it would be. I do get the email everyday and look at it, but it hasn’t made me any more likely to do those small tasks. Whether that is because of a lack of utility on the app’s part, or simply proof that these little tasks really don’t matter that much I’m not entirely sure.

There are a few very obvious things I can do to improve the lifechore.com (scheduling of daily email, email verification, etc.) whether I will actively pursue that depends on whether anyone shows an interest in using it.

I’d love to hear your feedback, suggestions, criticisms, etc. So please leave a comment or send me an email (address is on the left side of this post).

I’m also currently trying to decide what I should build next. If anyone wants to make some suggestions for next steps in my educational process I’d appreciate suggestions. (They don’t have to be novel ideas, just something that would teach me some new skills.)