Building Lots of Things

One of the earliest pieces of advice I received when I began programming was to “build things” and to “build lots of things.” Here is a collection of various projects I’ve created. Many of these projects are available on my GitHub repository, and I’ve written about some of them here.

FT news headline sentiment

18-Aug-23 Link This script retrieves headlines from the Financial Times for a specified country and analyzes the overall sentiment using OpenAI. Currently, no front-end has been developed.

Newsflow sentiment indicator

18-Aug-23 Link This script utilises the EOD API to analyze sentiment for a specified stock, looking back over one year based on news headlines. Additionally, it downloads the data into an Excel file, with each ticker presented on a separate tab.

Avatar Playground

30-10-22 Avatar Playground is an application allowing you to create a simple avatar consisting of a head, body, glasses and an accessory. The app was inspired by Nouns DAO Web 3 project, which I wrote about earlier here. I have also used Noun’s asset base for the Avatar traits, all written in plain Javascript. Font library is Londrina Solid, hosted on Netlify.

How can this evolve?

I am hoping to use this project as an experimental playground to learn a bit more about minting non-fungible tokens (NFTs) as well as programmable NFTs. I am also hoping to design a few new pixel traits myself, rather than only rely on Nouns DAO asset base.

The app is not really mobile friendly (styling web pages… a person weakness for now…) and works best on computer on Chrome.

But for now… you may enjoy the primitive avatar playground, and maybe even use it to update your own profile photo online!

Chord Hero

19-09-22 Chord Hero is a simple app that helps guitarists improve their skills, especially playing barre chords.

When I was learning to play the guitar, I always struggled with playing the so-called barre chords. There were a few songs that I really wanted to play that had an ‘F’ or a ‘Bm‘ chord, which made it almost impossible for me to play the song.

My guitar teacher told me that it would be a great idea if I could practice a little a drill. The exercise involved playing two random ‘easy’ chords that I knew and every third had to be one of the hard barre chord.

The idea for Chord Hero was born! I set out to create a random chord generator that allows you to practice different chords including the barre ones. The app was created over the weekend with plain-vanilla Javascript and deployed/hosted using Netlify.

The app has 4 modes; easy, medium, hard and random. The ‘easy’ mode has no barre chords. The ‘medium’ mode alternates with only one barre chord (F), while the ‘hard’ has two popular barre chords; F and Bm. The random mode mixes up all chords including barre chords.

In addition to the playing modes, Chord Hero has three different speeds which dictate how fast the chords are changing. I would recommend starting at Slow and then graduating into Medium. There is also an alerting ‘click’ sound when each chord changes, although there are some issues with actually hearing the sound on Safari browsers and Chrome on mobile devices.

The code is available on Github for any musicians/developers wanting to improve the application further.

If you have used Chord Hero, I would love to hear your thoughts, feedback and any requests and recommendations. Feel free to post them in the comments section below.

Updates

25-Sep-2022: Launch of v 1.1. Key updates:

Added timer that is set by default to ten minutes and counts backwards as you click ‘Start’.

Made some changes in three play options.

One or two bugs fixed.