A few months ago at a random Chinatown bar in New York City, Tyler Richards and I were having a conversation about journaling. I told him that I had over 4 years worth of consistent journal entries and Tyler, being the data-minded person he is, gave me an idea to reinforce the lessons and insights from these journaling sessions.
The Idea: A system that emails me a random journal entry every day so I could see exactly what was going on in my mind at that given time.
The Data: ~600 journal entries with content length ranging from cool 1-liners to 3 pages of word vomit
My journal entries are very free-form and stream-of-consciousness so I’m not totally sure if I’ll end up learning anything useful, but I was curious to find out. The first step? Create a database to hold all of my journal entries.
1. Creating the Database
Holding all of my entries in a way that could be easily & efficiently accessed while also providing me the flexibility to add new entries if needed, SQLite was the tool for the job. This tutorial provides a good introduction to understanding how to create and query a local SQLite database with Python.
