So, I wanted to share something I’ve been working on, something I started calling my “gold nautilus”. It wasn’t planned, really. I was just fiddling around, trying to sort out a mess I had with organizing my digital notes and files. It felt like swimming in junk most days.
The Start of It
I started simple. Just trying to figure out a better way to tag stuff automatically. I looked at existing tools, sure, but nothing quite clicked. They were either too complicated or didn’t handle the specific way I dump information. You know, random thoughts, snippets, bits of code, links. It’s chaos.
So, I thought, okay, maybe I can stitch something small together myself. I remembered some old scripts I wrote ages ago, stuff I’d mostly forgotten about. Dug them up. Man, looking at old code is… something else. Embarrassing mostly, but there were bits, ideas, that weren’t totally terrible.
I pulled out the useful pieces. Started connecting them. First attempt was a disaster. Didn’t work at all. Just threw errors left and right. Felt like giving up right there. Honestly, I almost did. Went to bed grumpy.
Next day, I looked at it again. Decided to break it down. Forget the fancy stuff, just get one tiny thing working. Like, just identifying keywords in a text file. Got that working. Okay, small win. Then, figure out how to apply a tag based on that keyword. Another small step. It was slow going.
- Pulled old script snippets.
- Tried connecting them (failed).
- Broke the problem down.
- Focused on one tiny step at a time.
- Tested constantly after each small change.
I spent a few evenings on it, maybe an hour here, two hours there. Lots of searching online for simple commands, bits of logic I couldn’t remember. Lots of trial and error. Sometimes I’d type something, run it, and just stare at the screen wondering why it blew up. Other times, a small change would suddenly make a piece work, and that felt really good.
Finding the “Gold”
The breakthrough came unexpectedly. I was trying to make it handle different file types – text, markdown, maybe even PDFs eventually. I stumbled on a particular library or method, can’t even remember the exact detail now, but when I plugged it in, suddenly it wasn’t just working, it was working smartly. It started categorizing things with surprising accuracy. It felt like it understood what I wanted without me explicitly programming every single rule.
That’s when I started calling it my “gold nautilus”. It felt like I’d found this perfect, intricate shell on the beach. Not because it was super complex or world-changing, but because it perfectly fit my weird, specific need. It emerged from all that messy tinkering.
Now, it’s a core part of how I manage my digital clutter. It runs quietly in the background, tagging and sorting. It’s not perfect, still hiccups sometimes. But it’s mine. I built it piece by piece from almost nothing. And the process itself, going from frustration to that “aha!” moment, that was valuable too. It reminded me that sometimes just starting small, chipping away at a problem, can lead to something pretty neat, even if it’s just neat for yourself.
