Daily Blog - December 22, 2025

Yesterday I forgot to write a post, but I didn’t really do much other than play Slay the Spire some more and look at some food/upc databases.

UPC databases

So there are a few problems with the food database so far. First, the government database is hard to search. You’d have to find the brand and general product, then search through a list of variants to find the exact one you want. This is tedious and time-consuming. I think I can implement a kind of fuzzy search on top of that to make it easier. Another issue is that the UPC / barcode data is not centralized at all. Any company can stick any UPC on any product, so there is no guarantee that the UPC will actually correspond to the product you think it does. This is a big problem for a food logging app, since you want to be sure that the data you are logging is accurate. There’s a really small NLP library in javascript called ‘compromise’ that I might be able to use to do some fuzzy matching on product names to help with this.

Errands and Lunch

I went out to run some errands today. I needed to pick up some groceries and other stuff. Then when I got home, I made a quick lunch of a grilled cheese sandwich. After that we made chocolate chip cookies and watched The Nightmare Before Christmas.

Notes and Conclusions

Not much else to report today. Just a pretty chill day overall. In the next couple days I would like to

• Finish the food logging part of the blog
• Work on the discord book club bot
• Apply for jobs
• Work on the portfolio

That’s all for now. See you tomorrow!