I put my whole life into a single database
krausefx.com
I put my whole life into a single database
1–10 of 175 posts
Re: I put my whole life into a single database
#2Wow that's impressive. I've been thinking about doing this too.
How do you ensure that you consistently track? Automated pings? Physical buttons/sensors at your desk or I guess computer uptime maybe.
Other thing is did you have any concerns about making this info public, I guess it's not locating you exactly.
Re: I put my whole life into a single database
#3My version of this: Human Programming Interface https://github.com/karlicoss/HPI
It's a bit heavier on the automatic data aggregation side, but has some manual inputs as data sources too. I'm hoping to make it easier to interface with existing tools for data analysis, dashboards, notebooks etc.
Re: I put my whole life into a single database
#4How could it be his whole life if he hasn't catalogued his thoughts? He doesn't show that he has metrics about the thoughts he has.
Re: I put my whole life into a single database
#5I think bots are a great way of automating your life in fun ways. It's also my new favorite project to suggest to people starting to program, because just a little bit of customizability goes a long way
Tracking mood is great. A simple telegram bot -> a google sheet lets telegram do the mobile/desktop UI and you just control the logic
One overlooked thing is automating financial tracking/categorization. In the US there's no good cross banking api except for email. Almost every credit card, bank, etc can email a receipt (set the minimum amount of alerts to be $0.01). The flowchart for parsing is bank alert -> gmail -> gmail filter by from address adds a label -> google pub sub notices that label and pings a little VPS somewhere -> gmail api -> parse email -> telegram bot
As I type, it sounds complicated but each step is well trod and has tutorials available. Now you have the ability to make custom push notifications for any transaction with < 1 second latency, instead of using the bank app. And it's all under your control. So the telegram bot allows you to categorize those purchases, you can add little notes or put it in categories. The nice thing is instead of looking at the end of the month and having 100+ little purchases and trying to remember if you ate at Starbucks 4 weeks ago, you categorize things as they happen in just a few clicks. And adding a category (one click) at the time implicitly marks the purchase as 'known good', not a suspicious purchase. So you can cross check at the end of the month for purchases you didn't categorize as suspicious.
Re: I put my whole life into a single database
#6Wow that's impressive. I've been thinking about doing this too. How do you ensure that you consistently track? Automated pings? Physical buttons/sensors at your desk or I guess computer uptime maybe. Other thing is did you have any concerns about making this info public, I guess it's not locating you exactly.
One thing I've thought of is that on android, it's not so hard to get app usage in a custom app, as a proxy for being on the phone. So it could check if you've been on your phone for 15+ minutes and then ping you only then. It would take some app -> server -> telegram app communication
Re: I put my whole life into a single database
#7This is super cool.
In case you don't make it through to the project's webpage howisfelix.today, and read through to the end, here is the creator's conclusion:
Overall, having spent a significant amount of time building this project, scaling it up to the size it’s at now, as well as analysing the data, the main conclusion is that it is not worth building your own solution, and investing this much time. When I first started building this project 3 years ago, I expected to learn way more surprising and interesting facts. There were some, and it’s super interesting to look through those graphs, however retrospectively, it did not justify the hundreds of hours I invested in this project.
I’ll likely continue tracking my mood, as well as a few other key metrics, however will significantly reduce the amount of time I invest in it.
Re: I put my whole life into a single database
#8I think bots are a great way of automating your life in fun ways. It's also my new favorite project to suggest to people starting to program, because just a little bit of customizability goes a long way Tracking mood is great. A simple telegram bot -> a google sheet lets telegram do the mobile/desktop UI and you just control the logic One overlooked thing is automating financial tracking/categorization. In the US the…
If you own the server, it might be easier to set up a little smtp client. Or to be more security conscious, a incoming only smtp client like https://github.com/0xERR0R/mailcatcher/ and collapse that dataflow. But pubsub has a monstrous free tier anyway and I also wanted to keep a copy of the emails on gmail which is easier to search
Re: I put my whole life into a single database
#9Very cool! Love you work.
Re: I put my whole life into a single database
#10This post is interesting, but the whole project seems like a vanity project to put on your resume. I’d argue that it’s peak vanity project.
Once you have the basics of collect>summarise>publish metrics, it’s trivial to add just one more.
Do people really need every single aspect of their lives measurable to this degree?
Does anyone (other than your mother) really care?
I, for one, would hate for this to become a thing. It’s like a personal Facebook, but with infinitesimally more extra junk that I don’t want to know.