How This Mess Started
Alright, so heard about this Neal Moses thing floating around. Figured I’d poke at it over the weekend. Grabbed my laptop, dumped some cold coffee down, and just started digging. Totally unprepared, like usual.
Found bits and pieces scattered all over the place. Reddit threads? Useless. Forum posts? Mostly people arguing. Felt like looking for my keys in a dumpster fire. Clicked through page after page, smelling last night’s pizza boxes near my keyboard.
Trying to Make Something Stick
Decided, screw it, I’m gonna try building something. Opened up my code editor – the crusty old one I never update. Typed out some garbage that felt like it should work. Imported a couple libraries everybody was talking about.
- Slapped together a basic API connection first. Used some outdated library probably abandoned years ago.
- Dumped data into a local file like a caveman. No database setup.
- Tried parsing whatever came back. Broke immediately. Of course.
Kept hitting dumb walls. Random errors kept popping up every five minutes. Stuff like “Auth Failed” or “Timeout” or just pure nothingness. Felt like yelling at my screen. Probably did, honestly.
That One Glimmer of Hope
Just before I threw the whole thing out the window? One thing finally clicked. Found this obscure config setting buried six pages deep in ancient docs nobody reads anymore. Changed some random boolean from False to True. Held my breath. Hit run.
And… holy crap, something happened! Data actually started pouring into my janky little file. Ugly, messy, raw data, but it was real stuff. Did a dumb victory dance in my creaky office chair. Scared the cat.
Cleaning Up The Mess
Now that it wasn’t completely busted, I had to make it less terrible. Replaced my crusty temporary file dump with an actual database. Sorta. Still messy. Built a super simple front-end thing to see the data:
- Threw some filter boxes on there. Looked awful.
- Basic pagination, because scrolling a million lines sucks.
- Search? Added later. Barely works. Ignores half the letters you type.
Took forever because I kept breaking it. Refactoring spaghetti code is like disarming a bomb with oven mitts on.
Why Bother?
Honestly? Mostly stubbornness. Also, my boss keeps yelling about “innovation” even though we can’t fix the coffee machine in the break room. This Neal Moses thing felt like actual movement, compared to yesterday’s spreadsheet hell.
Showed my boss the extremely ugly prototype earlier. Got grunted at. That’s basically a raise these days. Proves the grind wasn’t totally pointless. Maybe. Or just proves I have too much caffeine jitters.