Developer Week 051
Projects
Sarah (AI Developmental Editor)
Finished my first personal project for Boot.dev. In the making it grew into a full fledged SaaS idea; so now I’m in the middle of learning basic web design and interfaces with FastAPI, Jinja, and Tailwind.css.
https://github.com/pbrazeale/sarah
Sarah is an AI-powered editing assistant designed to help fiction authors refine their manuscripts with professional-grade insights. It automates chapter parsing, beat sheet analysis, line editing, and developmental feedback to support your storytelling and publishing goals.
Key Learning Points
- Us AI sooner as a review partner for code that’s working as expected. I can’t count the number of typos Gemini caught for me that I overlooked. In large part due to renaming a variable and not updating it everywhere.
- Learned about asynchronous processing and using
threadingto allow for an API call that will take too long to sit in a loop for.- Paired with
itertoolsand I was able to update my CLI interface with a loading screen. spinner = itertools.cycle(['-', '/', '|', '\\'])- Far superior solution to waiting around and checking my API web portal to see if the call went through. Also can help cut down surprise bills.
- Paired with
- There is no shame in setting aside the code base and starting over from the ground up with the knowledge gained from dead ends.
- A project will take twice as long and 3 times as much coffee to accomplish compared to initial estimates.