Okay, here’s my attempt at writing a blog post based on your instructions.
Alright folks, so today I wanna walk you through something I was tinkering with recently – I’m calling it “my friend mo”. It’s a pretty simple project, but I learned a bunch doing it, and thought I’d share my journey.
It all started last week. I was feeling a bit bored, scrolling through some open-source repos, and stumbled upon this cool library for generating random names. I immediately thought, “Hey, I could build a little something with this!”. The idea? A super basic web app that just spits out a random “friend” name, complete with a quirky little backstory. Why? Just for fun, really.
First thing’s first, I grabbed the library. I decided to use Python and Flask because it’s quick and dirty for small projects like this. I setup a basic Flask app. You know, the usual:
- Created a new directory for the project.
python -m venv venv- Activated the virtual environment
source venv/bin/activate - Installed Flask:
pip install flask
Then I dove into the code. I needed to hook up the random name generator. That was pretty straightforward. The library had a simple API, so I just imported it and called the function to get a random name. I spent a bit of time playing around with different options to customize the name generation – like, do I want it to include middle names? Should it be all lowercase, or properly capitalized?
Next up: the backstory. This was the fun part! I didn’t want to hardcode a bunch of backstories, so I thought about ways to make it dynamic. I decided to use a few lists of words and phrases to build sentences randomly. Things like:
- Adjectives: “adventurous”, “quirky”, “mischievous”, “loyal”
- Hobbies: “collecting stamps”, “competitive bird watching”, “extreme ironing”, “underwater basket weaving”
- Locations: “Antarctica”, “the moon”, “a pineapple under the sea”, “a forgotten corner of the internet”
I wrote a function that would randomly pick words from these lists and string them together to form a short paragraph. It’s totally ridiculous, but that’s the point! I wanted it to be absurd and unpredictable.
After that, I hooked it all up to the Flask route. So, when you hit the website’s main page, it generates a random name and a random backstory, and then displays them. I messed around with the HTML template a little to make it look presentable (or at least, not completely hideous). Used some basic CSS, nothing fancy.
Now, the first version was, let’s just say, rough. The backstories were often nonsensical, and the names sometimes sounded like gibberish. So, I spent some time tweaking the word lists and the sentence structure to make things a bit more coherent (while still keeping the randomness). It was a lot of trial and error – running the app, seeing what it generated, and then adjusting the code.
I also added a little “refresh” button. So, if you don’t like the first “friend” you get, you can just click the button to generate a new one. Simple, but effective.
Finally, I deployed it to a free Heroku instance. Figured, why not? It was a good excuse to refresh my memory on how to deploy a Flask app. Dealing with gunicorn and the Procfile… Ah, good times!
And that’s pretty much it. It’s nothing groundbreaking, but it was a fun little project. I learned a bit about random name generation, dynamic content creation, and the importance of iterating on your code. Plus, I now have a silly web app that generates imaginary friends with ridiculous backstories. Who knows, maybe someone will find it amusing!
If you’re looking for a quick and easy weekend project, I’d definitely recommend trying something similar. Find a cool library, come up with a silly idea, and just start coding. You might be surprised at what you come up with. And even if it’s a complete disaster, you’ll still learn something along the way.
