Blog posts tagged with plannning

The first day of the chatbot development challenge went well, and I felt disciplined and productive. While the work isn’t complete (and in reality, it’s never truly “finished”), I managed to make significant progress.

Today was all about planning, but this time, it was high-level and centered on databases and architecture. I decided to go with a setup I’m most comfortable with: FastAPI for the backend paired with PostgreSQL as the database. This will communicate with a static website built using the Astro framework, and for the chatbot, I’m using Svelte.js. It’s a straightforward setup, nothing too complex, but it’s still experimental, so I’m curious to see how it turns out.

I just wrapped up a full day of database creation—it’s easy to forget how time-consuming it can be! But now that everything is structured in both diagram and code, I feel much more in control of the project.

After a long weekend spent with my loved ones and the kids, I came back feeling recharged, and wow, today was incredibly productive! In just about five or six hours of work, I managed to knock out 10 endpoints across two different services, all fully unit-tested with 75% coverage. That’s about 800 lines of code—though depending on how you count it, with all the vertical spacing I used, the number might be misleading. Either way, it was a solid chunk of work, and I’m really pleased with the outcome.

Today was all about shifting gears. I moved from backend work to focusing on UI, UX, and frontend development. It’s always an interesting mental shift because these tasks require different kinds of thinking. Maybe it even uses a different part of the brain—I’m not sure, but it feels that way to me. It’s not always easy to switch contexts, but using AI tools like Cursor and GitHub Copilot really helps. These tools are also pretty good on the frontend side of things.