In mid-2020, life was very different than it is now. The world was a few months into the pandemic, so like many other students interested in computer science with little else to do, I started working on passion projects. This post will describe one of those endeavors, and through the story of the project’s rise and fall, I will relay an important lesson I’ve learned about work and memory over long periods of time.
Over a period of three months from roughly September to December 2020, as the second wave of the pandemic was hitting the United States in full force, I wanted to find some way to catalog my mood over time. Perhaps I could look back on it in the far-away future and gain a window into the hazy memories of a pandemic whose effects had (hopefully) been long relegated to the annals of history. But instead of using a journal or other traditional mood tracker to capture my emotional state during this time, I decided to make a playlist on Spotify.