Lately, I have been trying to get back into programming. In college I used to program all the time, urged on by the ever-present deadline. But, having been graduated for years now, I find that programming for fun tends to become harder and harder. Don’t get me wrong, I love writing code and seeing the fruits of my labor bloom into an usable product. However, psyching myself up to program, finish projects that I started months ago, and get something together is a lot harder than it seems. To solve this issue for myself, I am going to work on completing at least 10 big projects by the end of 2023, programming as a daily chore instead of just doing it when I feel like.

Actually_Doing_the_Projects

To achieve this end, I am going to probably drop the “man of mystery” theme because it is really difficult to talk about personal projects without linking to my GitHub. I will keep the domain name for now, but I may switch it to match my name instead. While I already have a personal website, it has been dead for months at this point so it may be better for me to just change the domain name and change the site’s name as well to reflect that. I will decide after a while, but until then that would only be a distraction from programming.

As for the projects themselves, I am going to start with finishing one I started in early November, which is a downloader for my Church’s streams. We always record the sermons using Audacity. But, every once in a while someone will forget to hit record. We give CDs of sermons to those that request them, but we need the mp3 format to burn the disks. This presents an obvious problem. When someone is new to the media team and hasn’t gotten used to doing the work, or perhaps if someone forgets their coffee that Sunday morning, they forget to record the sermon. Then when someone needs a CD to share the lesson we have to download and then convert the file.

The purpose of the program is to automatically download the audio from the streams, and save it as .mp3. For some reason though, it only wants to download them as .mp4, audio only. Its very odd its behavior. Upon doing some research, it seems that the reason it is doing this is because when you use the audio-only flag, PyTube (the library I am using to download the audio) automatically uses the mp4 format instead of letting you specify which format that you want. There are ways of getting that to work, but I have not added in those methods yet. You can keep up with that project by looking at my GitHub account. The link will also be in my about page.

Future_Projects

The purpose of this goal is to do ten projects of at least medium scope by 2024 is to get me comfortable with programming for fun again. Like I said, the first project will be finishing an already existing project. The next project will probably be Android focused. I believe that mobile programming is the future because while not everybody has a desktop or a laptop, everyone DOES have a cell phone. Also, I want to do something using machine learning and the Electron framework at some point. I will decide on those projects when I get to them. In the meantime I will provide updates on this blog every Saturday.