Adulthood really has its way of taking up so much of our waking time, doesn’t it? It feels like it was only yesterday I was upset by the end of Heroku’s free plan. A blink of an eye and suddenly we’re closer to the end of Spring and the beginning of Summer than we are to the snowy days in Luxembourg. Time flies.
What happened in the meantime for me was a lot. Work stuff, of course, as usual, doing some design and engineering stuff. On the other hand, there are also my recent adventures in learning new things. A couple of those stood out for me: the first is learning Rust using ChatGPT, and the second is my experience with learning Japanese through mobile apps.
I was thinking of writing this post months ago, ever since the infamous post by Heroku announcing the end of their free-tier plan, but a severe combination of the workplace’s busyness and homebound procrastination between September and November prevented me from doing so. Of course, I could blame nobody because of it. Now, with me finally returning from my vacation (gonna dedicate a full blog post about it later I think), and things cooling down at work (it actually isn’t, but things are much more ordered now with the arrival of new engineers–again, gonna dedicate a post for it later), I finally got the time to end my Heroku apps, migrate most of them, and of course, write this post.
Tomorrow Heroku will delete all free dynos End of an era.
Inspired by several other similar existing projects, I began making my weekend project last Saturday and kinda accomplished it on Sunday afternoon. Why did I do this, by the way? Well although I’ve been using Python’s Streamlit and Heroku for a while at work, I have never used them for any of my personal projects—not that I’ve had any personal projects ever since I started my new job anyway, but, well—
So the idea of the word cloud is pretty simple: you make a cloud of words, based on a text, where the words that appear most would have a bigger size. In the case of my web app, it will extract the tweets from a certain user (we can choose any user, simply input their username, and as long as their profile is open and public, you’ll be able to scrape their tweets), get all the words they’ve used, and make a word cloud from them. That’s it.
In the beginning, I thought of copying the others and making some kind of “Your 2021 Twitter Highlights”, but in the end, I decided to make the app work in two modes: either by inputting the number of last tweets that you want to extract (max. 2000 tweets) or extracting the dates within one interval (by default, starts from today until a year ago, max. interval one year, and max. 2000 tweets). You might be asking, why only 2000 tweets? Well, I don’t want my app to be blocked by Twitter, that’s the first thing, the second is I’m running my app on the free version of Heroku, so limiting the processing time and power is kinda necessary for me.
Anyway, above is a short demo on using the app on mobile, and here are two examples of the word clouds that I have generated based on these two users’ last 1000 tweets:
I’m kinda surprised by the amount of “presale” that Peterson tweeted, but whatever
Yorushika (ヨルシカ) has been on my playlist for a while but they just really become my most favorite artist.
Nobody else comes close.
The music, the vocals, the lyrics of their songs, and the overall vibe of their works which always radiate this strange acceptance of sadness and the will to keep moving forward? I love all of those.
I hope they will be getting more successful and can keep releasing more songs like this in the future.
To say that a lot of things have changed these past few months would be quite an understatement. For me, personally, it’s been quite difficult, challenging, and for sure, many other changes would happen in the coming weeks. But what I can say for now is these:
my contract with Henri SELMER Paris has ended
I’ve gotten myself a new, permanent contract with another company
will update you more about it in the coming weeks, but for now, I can say, quite comfortably, that–boy–I made a good choice to learn Python and Cast3m.
That’s it. Finally, please enjoy this ridiculously cool advert that just popped up on my Instagram’s feed:
Tidak jauh dari Brussels, menaiki kereta api satu kali tanpa transit, aku tiba di sebuah tempat yang digadang-gadang sebagai kota paling terkenal di Belgia. Begitu menginjakkan kaki di sana, aku pun langsung menyadari bahwa berita yang kudengar dari kota itu tidak main-main: the hype is real. Ratusan turis mengalir keluar dari stasiun setiap detiknya, melangkah beramai-ramai menuju halte bus, atau berjalan kaki, atau membuka sepeda lipat mereka dan mulai melaju menuju pusat kota.
Bruges. Aku mengetahui nama kota ini dari sebuah film. Selain itu, aku tidak tahu apa-apa lagi mengenainya. Situs wisata apa yang terkenal, makanan khas setempat, lokasi-lokasi untuk pestanya, tempat kumpul anak muda, komunitasnya, sama sekali tidak ada yang kuketahui. Aku tidak punya ekspektasi sama sekali mengenai apa yang akan kuhadapi di sana atau apa yang kuharapkan dari kota itu.
The Memo 