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Made by Omar Shehata (omarshehata.me), for Glitch's "self portrait" code jam.

This is an experiment in (1) aggregating "advice I wish I knew" lists that I've stumbled on (2) making connections based on this.

1. I think there's something intimate about reading someone's guiding life principles, as a way of getting to know them.
2. It's very validating to see your own advice that you came to independently echoed by others
3. It's fascinating to see, when you find someone who does live their life with some shared values, what else do they hold sacred?

After you enter your advice on the homepage, you can see connections at the bottom of your advice page (generated by a script I try to run daily-ish). For example, on my page there is currently this connection between my "you can't get things done without improving your mood" principle with Evy's "prioritize feeling good":

I've also found this other connection that I thought was quite beautiful! Between this advice about clouds, and my "a still more glorious dawn awaits" (which is a quote from Carl Sagan about the grandeur of the universe that deeply inspires me).

I hope you find something that helps, and maybe leave something that helps too.

Decentralized aggregation

My favorite thing about exploring other people's life principles has been seeing how they choose to share them on their own website. These were the original sites that inspired this project:

• My principles
• Jon Tiburzi's principles
• Evy's ever-changing manifesto
• Kevin Kelly's 68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice

I'd love to see a version of this app where, instead of hosting pieces of advice directly, it reads an XML/RSS-feed from people's personal websites. The app then just becomes a way to help you stumble on these personal sites, or find connections!

And that way, the advice lives on even if this app does not.

How data is stored

When you open the homepage the app checks for a token in your local storage. If it doesn't find one, it requests a new user from the server and stores the token. This way, you automatically get an account without having to sign up/enter your email etc.

The downside is your password is stored in plain text in the database and in local storage. So, don't submit anything in the app that you need to keep secret or anything!!

The "connections" at the bottom of each author's page are generated with a script that I run manually. It uses TensorFlow's "Universal Sentence Encoder" to find matches based on text similarity.

Source code

https://glitch.com/~advice-to-myself

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