November, 2023 DK30 Challenge!

To learn more about DK30: DK30 About

Basically, a few times per year; fans of Day9 (or DayKnights) all work on a personal project for a month. I have chosen to write a Tarot App. Primarily my goal is simply to program more.

DK30 Update 01

Here is a quick proof of concept of this tarot app I plan to write. :)

Damn what’s with this lag. Guess I have to learn how to use the profiler now.

DK30 Update 02

I promise I know what transparency is and how to export animation from after effects.

Below I decided to mess around with the potential animating of a card flip. I exported a very very simple animation of a card flip and attempted to set it up in my app.

Other than the obvious problems - I am currently running into some issues stemming from my lack of understanding of Qt and their documentation. I believe QMovie only plays gifs, for example. Regardless, now that I know I can indeed play a gif I opted to keep things simple for now and use a still image of the back of the card, see second video.

Much better. For now this is a fine substitute to the card flip animation. I think I can call this a mini win as I did indeed learn about QMovie vs QPixmap. Baby programming steps.

DK30 Update 03

Moving right along:

Dk30 Update 04

Continuing to polish the project - I was going to fully redo the UI but decided it might be too much work for the amount of time left.

DK30 Update 05

DK30 Update 06

I am very pleased with the first draft of the Tarot App. This is the first python project I have ever written completely on my own, and I am floored. Everything I wanted out of this project I got. I have a much clearer idea of where I want to take this app and am genuinely enjoying the work. Not only did I get the first version finished, but I also took a wild detour and decided to learn SQL (I realized I could have a bunch of dictionaries, or I could try out a database). Since I am a self-taught programmer I know I am missing a lot of foundational knowledge (folder directory organization, why my .exe doesn't have images, if I should use a database or not etc.), but I am still quite pleased with this project and my progress!

That being said here is a quick breakdown/review of my project:

Objectives Complete:
- write my first project
- program more in general
- create something reasonably well executed enough to commit to git (ie write something that doesn't completely embarrass me, though idk is it embarrassing to write a tarot card app in the tech world? XD )
- find gaps in my knowledge
- push to gitHub

Bonus Objectives:
- work on my writing and tarot reading skills for the descriptions
- learn about UI (boy howdy did I think UI was going to be simple... o.o)
- learn SQL lol
- discover I want to take this much further (and that I *love* programming I had so much fun writing this)
- chance to reread some favorite tarot literature

Objectives I missed:
- build a single window to work in
- write meanings for each card position in the reading (past, present, obstacle etc - this is when instead of several dictionaries I think a database would be better. I also think I might want to look into language models for this.)
- implement the 'Get Summary' button for each reading

Shoutout to Arachezy as my awesome accountabilibuddy, and my new, inspiring friend sd(staydynamic).