Oct 10 Updates / Recovered & Coding
Hey it’s been exactly 2 weeks since the last update. How fortuitous.
So, in those 2 weeks I have been stricken with grave illness. Perhaps I was technically not sick, but I felt awful pains, terrible exhaustion, and I couldn’t sleep for shit. I did nevertheless attempt to continue my coding studies but doing so was endlessly frustrating given my complete lack of energy and focus.
That, however (thank god) is in the past now, and these last couple days I’ve been feeling well again which means that I’m back on the grind 😎
In my last update, I said that I started to learn programming in Python so that I would be able to name my image files correctly. Well, this simple initiative has escalated completely. The next thing I wanted was to automatically interact with my store backend via the API. That is, to write code to perform tasks on my website, such as updating product information, without even having to visit my website.
Turns out, I had to learn a whole new programming language for this, GraphQL. Initially, this was immensely frustrating because Python had a built in library for doing such tasks, but it will expire in the near future, so I had to learn a new language and I thought it’d just take me a second to set it up, as it did with the Python library, but it was moderately arduous to learn all the correct syntax and what not.
ANYWAYS, I have a firm initial grasp over GraphQL now, I feel. In the end, 2 weeks is not actually that long to get used to something. It’s just that in my head everything goes so much faster so it always feels like it takes forever. And hey it does feel pretty rewarding to be able to do basic tasks on my website with some scripts.
I’ll tell you something ironic. The whole point of this, to learn these programming languages, is to be able to work more efficiently by automating tasks. Now, the tasks that I have set out I wanted to do, I could probably do in one day manually. Instead, however, I have been learning how to code for like … 3 weeks now 🤣. So much for efficiency, huh?
But, of course, the premise is that it’ll be useful in the future, when I have to perform said tasks frequently and on larger scales. +1 for scalability. It’s also just fun.
So, where to go from here?
Well, I have one task set out that I want to achieve through my own code with minimal manual actions. That is, for every product that I have, remove the existing images, add the correct images and put them in the right order, and delete all the unused files.
I have already learnt that Shopify does not allow you to upload images via the API. This is unfortunate. Nor can you simply add an image to your product that is already in your library. It will add whatever file you select and upload it to your library, and create a copy if it already is in the library! This is legit silly. What this means is that I will have to manually assign all my images to the correct products. Ugh, can you imagine? That’d take like, 20 seconds per product. Shopify, if you read this, please help a developer out!
When all that is set and done I will probably want to do some more coding tasks, see what the possibilities are.
After that, I can move on to the different stuff. I will probably do some social media updates again. I also need to get going on developing more images given how minuscule the selection is right now. Bunch of stuff that could be done. In either way, I do intend to run some ads by the end of the year. Hope that I can ride along the holiday purchase waves. We’ll see.
Random funny video I watched this week:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kH6QJzmLYtw&pp=ygUVdHVyYnVsZW5jZSB1bmNlbnNvcmVk
Cheers 🫡
Michel
Image generated by ChatGPT. I used the prompt “guy laying in bed dreaming of blocks of computer code” and it took the “blocks” part very literally. Anyhow, I’ll keep it cause it looks kinda stupid and goofy.