DEV Community: Gwynne Michele

Command Line Habit Tracker - a Tiny Useful Project

Gwynne Michele — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 20:57:36 +0000

After several weeks of following courses and tutorials, I dove into making something of my own. Something that would actually be useful for me right now.

A little command line habit tracker.

Nothing fancy. Written in python, with habit data stored in a json file.

There's a menu, you pick what you want to do, it does the thing, and the menu pops up again, repeating until you decide to exit.

It's not fancy - I do plan to add some styling, and also add a function for displaying streaks. I'm also looking forward to using my own private copy of it to actually track my habits, and eventually have enough data to play with in a Jupyter notebook.

It's not the sort of program that's ever going to become the next big trending app. It's just a bitty thing tailored to my own life and what I want to work on - daily habit tracking - done in terminal so that I can just quickly log my habits without the sort of context-switching that leads to distractions.

I'm a newbie coder and it's a newbie project, but still super satisfying when it worked!

GwynneMichele / command-line-habit-tracker

A basic command line habit tracker, built as a learning project. Something simple, but useful. For more info, check the README.

command-line-habit-tracker

Entry 1 - March 6, 2026

I'm a newbie programmer. I've been following courses and tutorials for game development and data analytics, and it's now time for me to move past tutorials into small, but useful, projects that I can develop from scratch with just a bit of AI assistance in the form of using Claude not to code for me, but to create tutorials for me to follow so that I can get more practice with thinking through how apps/games I develop should flow, building the logic and loops, getting the code working, and then gradually making improvments and adding new features.

This one is starting VERY basic. There's gonna be a menu, hard-coded list of habits, a basic JSON data structure, and the ability to add habits completed each day. Later versions will add more features, like being able to add and delete habits from the list…

View on GitHub

I Did My First Small Data Analysis Project Last Night: I'm Hooked

Gwynne Michele — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 16:51:52 +0000

I got a smart watch the other day. And it occurred to me it would be useful to have access to that data as I progress along my coding learning path, which includes learning some data analysis.

What better data to analyze than my own?

I'd been using Google Fit on my android phones since 2017 as a step/activity tracker, so I dug into the Google Takeout options and set up a backup of my data to be sent to my Drive every two months - which was the max frequency for that dataset.

The first data backup was deposited that day. Two zip drives worth.

I decided to focus on just one file - a csv of Daily Activity, each day's activity data on a single line. 2084 lines total. 9 years worth of daily step data.

Now, I didn't want to wait until I was actually in the data analytics sections of the learning pathways I'm following, so I hopped over to a friendly AI and asked it to walk me through running python in terminal for data analysis. Step-by-step. Not do it for me, tell me what to do, and help me figure out what I did wrong when the code doesn't work.

Started super basic.

Strip out the columns that have no data or have data that's not really relevant - like the calorie tracking was an estimate based on activity data.

I focused on step counts. Getting low, median, and high daily step counts. Looked at them yearly, and saw the unsurprising drop of the median step count by half in 2024 - that's the year I broke my leg and spent three months in bed and three months relearning how to walk. I learned I'm still not back at my pre-2024 baseline, but even though I've only been walking indoors the last month because it's been so cold, my median daily average step count IS still trending upwards.

Like, this is super simple data analytics. Really basic stuff on a personal dataset that applies only to me.

But it's also very useful for me.

I have a data-backed record of the impact of my injury.
And I can create a data-backed plan for increasing my step count and getting back to, then surpassing, that pre-2024 baseline.

And because it's very personal, it makes learning the coding part of it easier.

Next up, figuring out how to make a nice visual dashboard that takes that old data, spits out the medians, and allows me to make projections based on daily step goals (I'll add other activities later - I've got a bunch of data on bike rides and meditation as well). Once I get new data, in about two months, I can then add that to the data in the dashboard and compare those projections and the actual data to make adjustments to future goals.

I'll probably be dropping it all in git (data anonymized, of course), not because I think it's anything groundbreaking, but because I want to document my progress as I go learning how to code and creating projects that are genuinely useful and fun to me.

College vs DIY Learning Coding

Gwynne Michele — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 16:39:41 +0000

I'm taking an intro to programming class for gen ed credits this semester. Finishing up a philosophy degree, and you have to have a bunch of credits NOT in your degree field.

It's a 14-week semester and the course focuses on learning python.

Last Friday's assignment included writing code to produce the factor of an integer input by the user.

Last week, I also started the Boot.Dev backend developer path in python and go. That little factorial code I wrote came in handy during one of the lessons that asked for exactly that when I was going through it the day after the class assignment was due. And then I kept going, finished the python course, got through the linux course and the first small project of making a "book bot" in python that analyzes word and character frequency and outputs it neatly in terminal, and now I'm working through the git course.

The next assignment for the coding course? We have to add code that formats the output in a tiny little mpg calculator program we've been gradually modifying as we go.

I am not just taking the Boot.dev course. It just happens to work really well for me because I'm a sucker for gamification. Give me XP and digital goodies, and I am hooked. Better hooked to learning than to gambling!

But the independent study is going WAY faster than the formal college course with a professor teaching it is. And the professor can't really make it go faster - not if he wants to keep up with effectively grading all the student's work as we go.

I'm learning to code because I want to pick up some data analysis skills for my own independent research projects, as well as some game dev skills for some games of my own I want to create. That intrinsic motivation works very well for self-directed learning path, and coding is one of those paths that you can do without expert guidance and just learning how to google for answers. Because when you run the code, you get feedback immediately. Something didn't work, your terminal probably tells you where it broke, you adjust and run again. Eventually, you get something that works.

That's doesn't mean college isn't worth it - wouldn't trade my philosophy training for anything. I started and paused that degree almost two decades ago and in the intervening time read a LOT of philosophy on my own in addition to consuming philosophy content on the web. And unlike with coding, you don't get a good level of feedback outside of the classroom in that field. A comments section does not compare to a professor critiquing your paper for a grade.

I need 18 more credits to graduate after this semester.

I probably won't take another programming or computer science class at all. There's so many resources for learning to code, including oodles of free coding challenges that walk you through projects, that I can go at whatever pace I want. If I want to hyperfixate and work through four boot.dev courses in a week, I can do that. That's not really an option in college courses that teach a standardized curriculum, not one that is tailored to the desired outcomes of the individual student.

Starting a dev journey

Gwynne Michele — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 23:15:15 +0000

I'm a beginner, but not entirely a newbie. I learned BASIC in the 80s as a kid, html + css as a 20-something, but then hardly did anything with any code after that because I was more focused on other things.

But I'm at a point in my life where I can focus on learning to code, and I'm having fun with it.

I've got some apps I want to create and games I want to build.

Not necessarily to monetize them, but because I just want to build them. I enjoy building skills to create things just for the sake of it. I've also got personal independent research interests that would benefit from some data analysis skills, and coding helps with that a whole lot.

I'm currently in college full-time, remote **from a university whose campus is less than three miles from my house because I'm a **hermit. Finishing up a philosophy degree I started and then paused two decades ago.

I'm taking CSC-120 as an gen ed elective for that degree. Python programming. Having assignments and due dates means I'm actually working through it.

I'm also starting to work through some of the projects on Frontend Mentor to polish my rusty html and css skills, and I'm a sucker for gamified learning, so I'm working through the learning paths on Boot.dev.

And I'm here to document my progress as I go. Share the little projects I do, building up to bigger and bigger projects, until I can finally do the really involved stuff of my dreams.