Update for the week ending on Friday, Jun 14, 2019

Zestful

I unexpectedly spent most of the week on Zestful because I’ve suddenly had several customers who are interested in the service.

Created an internal web app for training my machine learning model
- My old method was just filling out CSVs but that was a bad solution because it’s too far removed from the ML subsystem. The ML subsystem takes in tokens and gives back labels, so I need a way of training it the same way.
- It’s also much faster and less error-prone than filling out CSVs
Had a call with a potential customer
Tried to drop my old crufty CRF engine and switch to the Python-native pycrfsuite but my accuracy went way down
Complained to RapidAPI that they’re penalizing my API for HTTP 400 errors
- HTTP 400s mean that the client (a Zestful customer) sent a malformed request. HTTP 400 is the right way of indicating to them that they’re sending in the incorrect format.
- Instead RapidAPI appears to be counting these as errors, suggesting that my service is unreliable
- Support case with them is ongoing
Submitted Zestful to the public-apis repo

Added a “Save Draft” feature.
Refactored authentication logic to make it easier to write unit tests
Tried to share What Got Done on /r/productivity but the post was shadow-filtered.

Reached out to three new copywriters requesting interviews
- Two said they don’t do much email anymore, but were open to talking to me
- One wasn’t interested in an interview, but made a video response explaining her process to me, which was neat
Researched 5-6 prospective customers to reach out to