A Glimmer

I built an application over the weekend because I wanted it – basically it allows me to “measure everything” – track events in my life and correlate the events to how I feel day by day.

I’ve been doing something similar on an Excel Spreadsheet for a while, but there are a few problems with doing it this way. First, eventually I get to the point where I can’t see the column headers for the columns I’ve created. Second, I have to fill in each and every column every day – most of the independent variables are of the “I ate went jogging” variety, so this means that the answer to most of them is, “No I didn’t”. So I wanted a system where I could quickly just enter in the data with a couple of key strokes. Finally, although Excel has some excellent plotting capabilities, I don’t know how to use them that well (and I have a feeling other people are in the same boat).

So the application ended up being a pretty simple one programming wise, but somehow I think it’s one of the most valuable ones I’ve ever created, because it’s actually useful. I’m hoping that I can improve it in the coming months. For now it just helps me record my life. Ultimately I’d like it to help me analyze the records too.

You can’t improve what you can’t measure. That’s my motivation.