My biggest win today had nothing to do with code

Work started way too late today. It was Saturday, so I let myself have a lazy morning with a slow dog walk and no real rush. When I finally sat down, I wanted to build an Etsy sales tracker to see what my competitors are selling. Yesterday I set up a custom portrait generator - now I needed to know what styles are actually trending.

On paper, this seemed simple. Etsy lists recently sold items on a public page. My plan was to use Chromium, some proxies, and Supabase to check that page every four hours. Instead, I spent the entire afternoon fighting with proxy setup and request blocks. It took hours of trial and error just to get a clean scraper running. I wanted a quick win, but the technical setup chewed up the whole day.

I realize that there are existing paid tools that already track this data. I could have just bought a subscription. But the point of this challenge is to build something every day, not just pay for a shortcut. The scraper works now, and it will be interesting to see if these little tools actually help me make money.

The real win of the day came after I stopped coding. In the evening, I went to the gym for the first time in over six months. I have been putting this off for a long time. This year of focus is about building software, but it is also about personal improvements and being better. Getting over that mental block to work out felt better than fixing any bug.

Tomorrow I will clean up the data pipeline and start analyzing what my competitors are selling. I also commit to not letting a lazy morning ruin my focus time.