So, I’ve been tinkering with this little thing I started calling ‘daymax’. Sounds kinda official, doesn’t it? But honestly, it was just me trying to figure out the busiest part of the day for a little project I was running on the side. Nothing groundbreaking, just a personal itch I needed to scratch.
It all started because I was curious. I had this small online tool, just a hobby thing, and I wanted to know when it was getting the most hits, or when it was working its hardest. You know, to see if there was a pattern. My big goal: find that peak moment.
First off, my method was super sophisticated: I tried to just guess. Yeah, I’d check the logs randomly, squint at them, and think, “Hmm, looks busy now.” Real scientific, that was. Lasted about half a day before I realized I was mostly just noticing when I was free to check, not when things were actually popping.
So, I thought, okay, gotta be a bit more organized. I decided to actually record some numbers. My first proper attempt involved a spreadsheet. Revolutionary, I know. Every hour, or, let’s be real, whenever I remembered, I’d pop in and note down the activity count. Sometimes I’d be on the dot, other times I’d be like three hours late and try to guesstimate what I missed. The data was, shall we say, a bit messy.
I stuck with that manual way for a while. It was a pain, sure. I’d have sticky notes reminding me, alarms on my phone that I’d snooze. But I was learning something, mostly about how bad I am at consistently doing manual data entry. But also, slowly, a vague picture started to form. It seemed like there were definite busy spells and quiet times.
After a few weeks of this, I decided to get slightly more automated. And by ‘automated’, I mean I wrote a tiny, tiny script. Barely a script, more like a few lines of code that would just append a timestamp and a count to a text file every so often. It wasn’t pretty, and it probably broke a few times without me noticing immediately, but it was better than my sticky notes. This new text file became my golden source of truth for ‘daymax’.
Pulling the actual ‘daymax’ from this file was still pretty manual. I’d open it up at the end of the day, or sometimes the next morning, and just scroll through it, looking for the highest number. Sometimes I’d copy-paste it into another sheet to make it easier to sort, if I was feeling fancy. No fancy dashboards, no real-time charts. Just me and a raw text file.
And what did I find out from all this effort? Well, for my little project, the ‘daymax’ was usually around lunchtime or late afternoon. Not exactly a shocker, right? People procrastinating at work, maybe. The insights weren’t going to change the world. Sometimes the peak was just because I was testing something myself and forgot to filter out my own activity. Oops.
Looking back, the whole ‘daymax’ thing was more about the process for me. It wasn’t about discovering some secret pattern. It was about setting a small goal and figuring out a way to get there, even if it was clunky. It taught me that sometimes you just need a good enough solution to answer a simple question. You don’t always need the perfect, all-singing, all-dancing system, especially when you’re just starting to explore something. Just getting your hands dirty and trying stuff out, that’s where the real learning happens, I reckon.
