Today was one of those days that went in three directions at once. The main plan was to continue a major refactoring of our video routing project, but a couple of interesting side quests popped up and demanded attention. It was a classic juggling act between disciplined engineering, a tempting distraction, and a personal project that finally clicked.

I spent a good chunk of the day making sure our refactoring was solid. After migrating most of the code with AI assistance, I found it had missed a few old functions for exporting to Excel. Getting those back in was easy, but it tanked our radon code quality score. It took some focused work with black and mypy to clean things up and get back to an ‘A’ rating. If you’re going to refactor, you have to do it right.

Here’s a snapshot of the day’s ups and downs:

  • The Automation Rabbit Hole: An interesting request came in for an automation involving xlswings and Outlook. While it was a fun chance to play with a new library, I sank too much time into it before realizing Google Sheets was probably a better tool for the job. I pushed the code to Git and decided to move on—a good lesson in choosing the right tool before diving in.
  • A Surprise API Win: I got an early start and decided to tackle a personal project I’ve picked up and dropped several times: reverse-engineering a notebook service’s private API. The goal is to build a chat interface that uses it as a backend.
  • It Actually Worked! After a lot of trial and error, I finally got a coherent, Hebrew response from the service through my custom interface. Seeing it work was an incredible feeling.
  • The Next Hurdle: The connection isn’t persistent and relies on manually refreshing cookies. The next step is figuring out how to maintain a stable session, which will probably mean setting up a VPS.

It’s easy to feel like I was all over the place, but the thrill of the API project breakthrough made the whole day feel like a win. Moving between grinding on code quality, exploring a new idea, and achieving a personal goal is what makes this work so engaging.

Next: Finish the simple 5S automation I’ve been putting off—it’s quick, valuable, and needs to get done.

Tags: Python, Refactoring, API, Code Quality, Automation, Side Projects