Conquering fears
summary
Claim: ship something small to beat the fear of never finishing. Built Exquisite Text/Exquisite Hues, a one‑line collaborative poetry app fed by SMS that shows live poems in a browser. Uses Firebase realtime updates, SMS ingestion, initial Angular fiddling then vanilla JS, later Express backend, DigitalOcean deployment and encrypted phone numbers. Worked enough to collect ~150 poems, survive a 36‑hour hackathon sprint, win a small API prize and demonstrate real user emotion and unexpected, readable results.
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chapters (11)
- 0:00Introduction
- 2:13Early programming memories
- 5:04College and coding
- 7:14Burnout and new passions
- 9:02Poetry class inspiration
- 12:37Hackathon and first talk
- 15:06Overcoming self-doubt
- 18:02Preparing the talk
- 20:29Exquisite Text demo
- 25:26Future projects
- 26:30Closing
