Progress

Short progress updates on this project.

2026-04-13

What's done

• Have short python program that asks questions and gets input through CLI and writes questions (in bold) and answers (plain text) to a markdown (MD) file whose file path is hardcoded into the program

Working on

• Write today's date at the top of the file in an h2 in markdown before writing the questions and answers. Learn how to use the datetime module to do this

Later steps

• Learning to use datetime will be useful for generating a new file with today's date as the filename.
• Then later I will need to write today's date as an h2 for log entries that start with today's date into a file that contains multiple log entries (as per Functionality overview plans).

2026-04-14

What's done

• Program now writes today's date in an h2 in the markdown file before writing the questions & answers.
• If there is already a string with today's date in the file, then an h3 with "Update at" and the current time (HH:MM) is written before the question/answer list. So for a single day, the first log is printed under an h2 with today's date, and subsequent logs on the same day are written under an h3 that says "Update at {HH:MM}".
• If a question isn't answered, the question isn't printed in the MD file.

Working on

• Looking into how to open a new file within a user-provided directory and name it with today's date.
• Check to see if there is a file with today's date already and if not, create one.

Later steps

• Don't create a new file for each day, but append to existing file.
• Start a new file after X number of days or when a new month starts.

2026-04-17

What's done

• Program now opens a file with user-provided directory, with some error handling (could be improved)
• Noted above that I want to have it check if there's a file with today's date already; that automatically happens when I use with open() with 'a' flag.

Working on

• Same as "later steps" for 2026-04-14

2026-04-30

I added this later, based on separate notes I have

What's done

• Created a new version of the get_filepath function, which creates a filepath with the current month rather than the current date, then sends that over to main.py to open in "append" mode
  • This should create the file if it doesn't exist, and open it if it does

To work on

• It opens the monthly file but the first entry is "update at {time}" rather than just the first entry, so that needs to be fixed
• more unit tests!

2026-06-04

This has languished a bit while I started the Bad Website Club HTML and CSS bootcamp, using Free Code Camp's Responsive Web Design Certification.

To work on

• Have heard that there may be other ways to do a GUI interface with Python than tkinter so I'm doing some web research on various features and then decide which I want to start learning.
• I also need to go back to the code and see how far I've gotten with unit testing for inputs. Current testing file is test_get_filepath.py in this repo.

2026-06-20

Still focusing on Bad Website Club HTML and CSS bootcamp (a couple of weeks left) but trying to also spend a little time in between with this.

What's done

• Cleaned up some messages printed to the console and committed changes.

Working on

• Learning tkinter--decided to start python GUI by learning this b/c it seems a simple option to start with
• Have a very simple window opening in tkinter so far with a window title, a label sitting at the top of the window, and an entry box with a label (stuff entered there goes nowhere at this point).

To work on

• Need to get back to looking at the testing files and see what else I need to test (if anything at this point)
• Continue practicing with tkinter
• Currently, the program not only opens a file at the user-specified filepath, but already writes the date to it even if the user doesn't answer any questions/log any information (so then there's a date heading but no info after that). Need to adjust the flow so that the date heading is only written to the file if the user answers some questions/writes a log.
• This "progress" wiki page is getting long; change it so that there are sub-folders that are months (is that possible in the wiki?)

2026-08-08

What's done

• Refactored so that main.py mostly just calls other functions
• Now the date or time headings are only written in the markdown file if the user provides an answer to at least one question (before these were written as soon as the file was opened so if the user typed "end" and answered no questions there were headings written into the file with no content below).
• Now instead of writing each question and answer as soon as the user enters each answer, the questions and answers are collected into a dictionary and written once after all questions are answered or skipped (or if the user answers at least one and then types "end").
• Wrote more unit tests and refactored others to fit with new code structure

Working on

• Finishing unit tests to fit the new code structure
• Adding the option for the user to go back to the previous question if they accidentally skipped it, or want to change their answer.

Change of plans

• I was going to add a GUI with tkinter but have decided that I'll stop with finishing the above and all the testing. I am not sure how much value it will be to learn tkinter at this point and I have other projects to work on!