Blog

TLDR; Click to go straight to the TIL site!

I’m excited to share a project I’ve been working on – a “Today I Learned” (TIL) website!

This project actually serves two purposes: first, it’s a place where I can keep track of interesting little coding tidbits I stumble upon - those things where I’m sure future me is going to want to remember it. Second, I wanted to learn React and Next.js, and what better way to learn than by building something I’ll actually use? (Spoiler alert: it’s working! I’m actually using it! 🎉)

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This is my second app (huzzah!) – and I made it purely for learning purposes. I needed to figure out how to access online data, and weather data is a decent place to start since it’s familiar and there are a lot of well-documented options to choose from. The image above shows the main weather screen and also the secondary “city screen”.

For the insulin dosing app, I have a few different ideas for things to implement, but one of the big ones is to allow users to look up common foods directly inside the app. This was a concept that has been sort of scary to me for a while, mainly because I didn’t really have a clue how to do it. Turns out it’s not as hard as I thought it would be! 

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Hi everyone - I’m excited to share my first mobile app! It’s really more of a mini-app that is a step along the way to building something better, but it’s still a big deal to me ❤️ It’s extra fun because it let’s me mush together my absolute dorky love of coding, my appreciation for design, and of course - like any parent - my desire to make my kid’s life better.

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I’m trying to figure out if I’m just imagining it, or if Alma’s blood sugar is consistently high on the last day of her Omnipod.

For anyone who’s less familiar with insulin pumps and how they work, Alma wears an Omnipod Dash pump. It’s a little plastic pod that sticks to her body for three days and doses her with insulin when she needs it. It gets swapped out every three days. So every three days we refill it with fresh insulin.

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This time I covered a couple of things - daily statistics calculations and also some really really basic time series plotting. I like daily statistics - and copied most of the code from my older project (older post on daily stats). I like the quick interactive plotting with hvplot but those plots don’t render in a gist. Here’s an example of the “explorer” function of hvplot (it basically builds a mini-panel app).

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I should probably explain what I’m even trying to do here. I mean, my main goal is, of course, to improve the way I’m treating my daughter’s type 1 diabetes. But the question is - how?

One of the amazing benefits of the loop system is that you have control over so many variables. With Omnipod 5 (which is also great!), there’s quite a lot less you can tweak - you can set a few things but it’s a bit of a black box. Lots of people prefer it that way, no judgement here! On the flip side, while it’s more difficult to get things set up with loop, you can do pretty much any tweak you want. Which is amazing! But does involve a lot more effort in the beginning.

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The time zone thing is sort of a detail I could have skipped for the time being - I was already converting CGM times from “UTC” to “US/Eastern”, and it would have been fine for the foreseeable future… until we decided to travel someplace that is in a different time zone, and then it would have all gone wrong. So I’m trying to get out ahead of that and just doing the time zone shift on the fly based on the time zone listed in the loop profile settings.

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Almost every day for the past 6-ish years I’ve used a numerical model that falls under the category of “Hidden Markov Monte Carlo simulations”. And I almost never think about what it actually means, like, big picture. And so, now, under the additional category of “dorky things nobody asked for”, I will tell you all about it. I probably have no business trying to explain this but I’m gonna do it anyway buds.

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Now that we have Alma up and running with a DIY Loop system, all of her data live on a MongoDB database. Everything is in there - blood sugar (readings every 5 minutes!) and pump data (boluses, corrections, carb ratios, insulin sensitivities, basal settings, etc). This data could really help to figure out her settings - which would be AMAZING - but it’s going to take some time to figure out how to access it all.

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I made this one a while ago but figured I’d share it here (it’s also up on instagram).

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I think I’ve always loved data. But until my daughter, Alma, was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, I hadn’t really worked with any datasets that had this much personal meaning for me.

Alma was diagnosed about a year ago, when she was 5. It seemed completely out of the blue, and we knew almost nothing about it before that point. We quickly learned that type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease where your pancreas stops producing a hormone called insulin. In healthy people, insulin allows sugars in the bloodstream to transform into energy. Without insulin, that sugar doesn’t get converted, and it keeps building up in the bloodstream. This can lead to lots of serious symptoms and side effects.

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I went to update my old website this morning (after not touching it for over a year) and - surprise, surprise - it was fatally broken. Luckily I was bored of that website anyway, so I logged into Bluehost and wiped it off the face of the earth so I could start fresh. And that’s where we’re at.

The thing that brought me back to the ol’ website was the fact that I’m looking at some of my daughter’s diabetes data, and I always seem to want to share really nerdy code things. Especially things that - look, who knows - could help other people?

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