Alright, folks, been meaning to share a bit about this little project I’ve been wrestling with. I call it “kaiwen.” Nothing fancy, you know, not gonna change the world or anything, but it’s been quite the journey, and I figured, why not talk about it?
It all started a few months back. I was just getting so darn frustrated with my digital notes. I had bits and pieces everywhere – stuff on my phone, random text files on my computer, stickies on my monitor. It was a mess. Seriously, trying to find anything was a nightmare.
The breaking point
I remember one Tuesday, I spent a good half hour looking for a single phone number I knew I’d jotted down. That was it. I thought, “There has to be a better way, even if I have to build it myself, brick by brick.”
So, the first thing I did was look around. You know the drill. Checked out a bunch of apps, some fancy cloud services. Some were okay, but they either wanted a monthly fee for features I didn’t need, or they were just too complicated. I just wanted something simple, something that worked my way.
That’s when I decided, “Okay, I’m doing this.” I had a bit of free time, and I’ve always liked tinkering. My initial idea for “kaiwen” was just a tiny script. Something to pull all my text files from specific folders into one place. Sounds easy, right? Ha!
Getting Hands Dirty
I started sketching out what I wanted. My needs were pretty basic:
- Grab text files from different spots.
- Maybe tag them somehow, automatically if possible.
- Put them into a single, searchable place.
I dusted off my old coding setup. Python seemed like the easiest way to go for something like this. My first few attempts at writing the code were… well, let’s just say they were an adventure. It was a real spaghetti monster of code. Things kept breaking. I’d fix one thing, and two other things would fall apart. There were definitely moments I wanted to just give up and go back to my messy notes.
I spent a couple of evenings just staring at the screen, feeling like I was getting nowhere. One time, I accidentally had it trying to copy my entire documents folder. That was a fun little panic.
A Glimmer of Hope
But then, after a lot of trial and error – and I mean a lot – I got the first part working. It could actually find my designated note files and copy them. It was such a small victory, but man, it felt good. That little win gave me the push I needed to keep fiddling with it.
So, I kept chipping away at “kaiwen.” Added a bit here, tweaked a bit there. Figured out a crude way to add dates to the filenames so I could sort them. Then I managed to get a super basic search function going. It’s not Google, that’s for sure, but it finds my stuff.
Now, “kaiwen” is part of my daily routine. It’s still a bit clunky. The “interface,” if you can even call it that, is just my command line. And the code? If a real programmer looked at it, they’d probably have a good laugh. It’s definitely what you’d call “duct tape and prayers” engineering.
But here’s the thing: it works for me. It solved my problem. It’s my little creation, warts and all. And honestly, the process of building it, even with all the frustrations, was pretty satisfying. Just goes to show, sometimes the best tool is the one you make yourself, even if it’s not perfect. It’s the journey of getting it done, you know?
