Hello Reader,
In this newsletter, I'm sharing my recent lightbulb on procrastination that's changed how I work, and at the end of this newsletter I've compiled for you a list of my recent Python + AI project tutorials. I hope they are helpful for what you're doing/ learning at the moment.
Have fun reading!
🧐 What if it were easy?
I've been procrastinating on a GraphRAG tutorial for months.
Which is strange, because I actually find the topic interesting. I wanted to make this tutorial.
Okay, the busyness, pregnancy, and childbirth probably played a role. But the real reason it took me so long was this: I assumed it was too complicated.
After reading a bunch of articles and papers on GraphRAG, I had this subconscious belief that the topic was difficult and daunting.
"Building a Python project on it seems a lot of work." - or so I thought.
That unpleasant feeling of needing to overcome a looming obstacle was what blocked me from even starting.
And even when I finally did, I carried some nervous energy that was just draining.
What's supposed to be fun and exploratory became a grind - NOT because the work was hard, but because of my own illusion/ expectation that it was.
Today on an afternoon walk, I listened to the book Meditations for Mortals (by Oliver Burkeman) and came across a great tip:
Whenever you find yourself overcomplicating things, ask yourself:
"What if it were easy?"
It's such a powerful mindset shift.
If it were easy, I would just spin up a Jupyter notebook, test some code from a random blog post on a toy dataset, just to see how things look.
Or I could throw everything into Claude and ask it to walk me through things step by step. Or ask it to do a quick research for me on the topic.
So many options. Yet I was paralyzed 🙈.
I've heard so many of you share how you have a great idea for a project but never get around to it.
You feel tired just thinking about starting. So you procrastinate. Then you get annoyed at yourself for not having done anything by now already. And the cycle just keeps going..
You think - "let me read a few more articles, a few more LinkedIn posts, maybe one more tutorial, then I'll feel confident enough to start."
The truth is, you're probably overcomplicating things. Remember asking yourself: What if it were easy?
Not everything great has to be hard. 😀
🔗 My Python + AI Tutorials
If you've been meaning to dive into AI, LLMs, or vision models, here's the list. I have more coming soon, including the GraphRAG project above, so keep an eye on my Youtube channel.
1. I Let AI Analyze 5 Years of My Journals… Here's what it found
This is one of the most exciting personal projects I've done in a while: Let a local vision language model (vLM) read through my journal entries, fed it all to a local LLM, and had it answer questions I had about myself.
2. Building Your First AI Agent in Python - A Crash Course
Walks you through the basics of AI agents and how to build your first simple one.
3. Extracting Knowledge Graphs From Text With GPT4o
Learn how to build a knowledge graph from text using an LLM, then visualize it to gain insights.
4. How to Create a Beautiful Data Visualization Web App in 1 Hour (Cursor)
I let an AI agent build a complete scrollytelling data visualization app for me. Pretty cool to see how far coding agents have come, though still lots of room for improvement.
5. I Analyzed My Finance With Local LLMs
Run a local LLM via Ollama to analyze real income and expenses, keeping your data private while visualizing insights on a dashboard.
6. Extracting Structured Data From PDFs | Full Python AI Project (ft. Docker)
Extract structured data from PDFs using Python and GPT-4, build a Streamlit app around it, and deploy via Docker.
7. I Used AI to Track My Screen Time—Here’s What I Learned
I downloaded my last 30 days of screen time and analyzed it with AI, uncovering some surprising and not-so-surprising patterns about my digital habits.
8. Building a Chatbot with ChatGPT API and Reddit Data
Build a chatbot that answers questions based on real Reddit threads. A practical, fun way to explore LLMs and APIs.
Have a great week ahead! 🙌
Thu
P.S: Work with me:
If you want a comprehensive course from Python fundamentals to building AI applications, check out my Python for AI Projects course.
You'll join a community of 450+ learners who are building their projects while getting direct access to me and supporting each other along the way.
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