Micro app 13: The Comfort Zone Database

Something I find myself doing from time to time is wondering if I've mentioned a piece of tech before, run a specific challenge before, or just trying to remember what episode to reference when directing people to an old episode. This data exists and could be acquired if I needed to get it, but I wanted a better way.

This led to my latest micro-app, The Comfort Zone Database.

Using this website, I can instantly find all the episodes were we talked about anything I want. I'll put a video below showing how it works, but this has instantly removed basically all friction in finding what we discussed. For example, I'm able to quickly see all the episodes we mentioned the MacBook Neo.

And not only does it search the show notes and titles, it searches transcripts as well!

And because I couldn't help myself, I also made it so that clicking one of the transcript results brings you to the episode page and starts playing the episode in that segment.

How it works

There certainly could be a public version of this one day, but right now it's very much centered around my personal use case. The episode list is pulled from the RSS feed, and that feed is updated at build time. The transcripts are also being uploaded by me to the project with a very specific name format.

What this means is that once a week, I need to add the transcript file for the new episode and push the change to the repo, triggering Vercel to build and deploy the update. If I forget, this falls behind.

Ideally, this would be a generic interface that users could sign up for, add their own RSS feed, and then all details would automatically pull from their feed. The back end should also automatically check for updates on feeds every 6 hours or something like that as well. Transcript updates should pull from the remote files and not be a part of the code base, and there could be an upload UI to add these files from the web portal.