BNW006 - Project of January BooknoteWorthy

One of my New Year's Resolutions is to build something each month. This week, I finished my January Project BooknoteWorthy. This is a single page application that extracts highlights and notes from Apple Books and allows the exported content to be styled with templates.

I had this idea because I do most of my reading in Apple Books and wanted to keep a section for quotes from the books in my Obsidian book notes. I knew I could use Readwise, but didn't want to pay for the monthly subscription just for this feature, so I decided to write a program myself.

The design and tech stack changed a lot over the months. At first, I wanted to build a desktop app with electron and next.js. My progress was slow so I used a Jupyter notebook to test my ideas. Then I thought using Python should be easier so I tried PyQt. After that, I realized I don't really need an "app". A single page application is enough. A static site hosted on github pages is enough. This makes the project much simpler and only took me a week to finish. I'm not 100% satisfied with the the UI, but at least it works.

Things I learned:

Set a deadline

I started this project in September or October last year. I had the idea way before that. When I didn't have a deadline, I would write for a few hours one day and just stop for weeks. Writing down that this was my January Project definitely helped me finish it.

Start simple, get things done, and then build on top of that

When I started this project, I created several versions of UI; I thought about functions to import annotations from other reading apps such as WeRead and Kindle; I wanted to learn a new frontend framework; I thought about using a No-code platform. So many distractions. I have to remind myself that the most important thing is to make a working version first.

Record each step

Do you write down what you want to do, what you did, how it turned out, and how your solve the problems when you code? I find recording each step to be extremely helpful. Now when I have problems, often I just need to refer to my notes, which saves a lot of time.

📚 Book

Still reading The Thursday Murder Club.

🔖 Bookmarks

Image Stacks and iPhone Racks - Building an Internet Scale Meme Search Engine | FindThatMeme.com Blog

• Using iPhone devices as OCR server

Building a GPT-3 app with Next.js and Vercel Edge Functions – Vercel

• I might try Vercel for my next project

Caught in the Study Web - Cybernaut - Every

• I don't really get why this is so popular. But it's interesting to see comparison of the same topic on different platforms.

bleuje

• Blog about creative coding in Processing.

Training nanoGPT on my Journal

• Let's build GPT: from scratch, in code, spelled out. - YouTube
• Training GPT on my own writing? I'm hesitant to do that because maybe I will find out things about me that I don't really want to know.

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