#14: Extreme ironing
A couple of months back, I made a search engine to look for half loaves of bread in stores. I was tired of wasting leftover bread and made this because, well I could. You can try it here: halfloafnear.me
I used Dunzo as the data source so the search for half loaves was only available for big cities in India. In spite of this, it got unexpectedly viral in the USA. It was on the front page of Hacker News and led to an interview with NPR. I was also live on some morning radio show (CBC Radio) in umm, Canada. It was nerve-wracking but I think I did alright.
It was a wild few days and I enjoyed the buzz from the short-lived attention I received from North Americans who were confused as hell why I couldn’t just freeze the leftover bread. Sadly, it got almost no traction in India. An uncle from Dainik Bhaskar did interview me but never published it.
I tend to make things that I can finish within a weekend. Setting self-imposed constraints help me to finish things or bring them to some kind of a conclusion. In the case of this project, I started on a Friday and only decided to do things I could finish by Sunday. But I could not and it spilled over to the next week.
This was bad. I had one more week and because of more time, I became unhealthily involved with it. I spent every waking minute of the week staring at this project. Spending loads of time on trivial issues and unnecessary rabbit holes. At one point I felt like I intentionally didn’t want the project to end because if it did, I will have nothing else to look forward to. In that moment, it was as if this was the only thing that was giving my otherwise basic life any purpose.
I eventually did finish it though. When it was time to post it online, I wasn’t honestly expecting much. This was really niche and I don’t have many people following me on social media. And this is where I feel karma-based social networks like Hacker News and Reddit are such a blessing. Posts from anyone have a fair(-ish) chance to reach the top.
A few weeks after releasing the website, Google slapped me with a bill of around 30K INR for exceeding my free quota of Google Maps API. For a website that I bought for around 200 rupees and had no intention of making any money out of, I wasn’t going to pay Google shit. So I told them so and they understood. Thank god for that.
In the last issue of this newsletter, I talked about Googlewhack. It is a contest where you need to come up with a two-word search term that returns exactly one search result.
I attempted to create my own Googlewhack by using two obscure words together in the last issue - not going to mention the words here because that will mean two results may appear for this search term. But you can see a screenshot of the googlewhack here:
It took a few months for this to appear but it made me so happy to see this. I love the web!
I bought the domain peabee.xyz and made a blog/website for myself. It was a very cathartic experience building this. I am happy with how it looks so far. I will also publish a copy of these posts over there until I can find out a suitable substitute to Substack to deliver emails.
Some more links…
I tried Midjourney text-to-image generator and was blown away by how beautiful the results were. I have a couple of free invites for its beta, if you would like one, please reach out.
A project that I loved - The Owen Wilson Wow API. Someone made a JSON API that returns every “wow” that Owen Wilson has uttered in his movies. What’s even more incredible, they manually curated all the data for this. Projects like this make me so happy!
Extreme Ironing - an extreme sport I can get behind.
Would love to have a Midjourney beta invite! Pursuing masters in Comp Sci with an interest in AI, super intrigued by this tech