The First Post

Welcome to the first actual post on my blog! It feels like a big deal because I've never written a technical blog before.

What I want from this blog is to document the process of working through a project. I figure the added visibility will help me hold myself accountable to my goals, which has always been a sticking point for me when attempting to create something new that requires me to learn and stretch my abilities.

I've had several programming project ideas. It was hard choosing one because there are so many variables to consider: practicality, difficulty, and - most importantly - my level of interest.

One idea was to make an animated tree of life that would depict mass extinction events as described in a quote from The Sixth Extinction: "whole limbs being chopped off the tree of life." The tree would lose a genus, family or, some other taxonomic division and the user would get a bird's eye view of the end Cretaceous event. But this would require a data set of all the species that ever lived, and this data set either doesn't exist or is beyond my current Google search skill level.

Other ideas: a web app that allows a user to chat directly to my phone; a home-brewed FTP implementation; an online whiteboard that multiple clients can draw on simultaneously; a web page that displays the orbits of the planets. But what most captured my attention was an app shown in the film The Sound of Metal, a speech to text converter.

Writing a program that can hear a person speak English and translate it into text sounds hard, but I have two advantages:

1. Other people have written open source implementations I can reference
2. My application doesn't have to work well; it just has to work

In the following blog entries I'll document my path from research to, implementation. I hope that keeping this log will encourage me to finish the thing.

Here's hoping.