November 12, 2019

🎖️ Keeping Track of your Little Wins in Life

When the number of things that I wanted to keep tabs on increased, manually checking them started becoming a chore!

I started looking for a quick and easy way of tracking things I care about. My current setup is a combination of Touch Bar and a Telegram bot.

Touch Bar (Pull-based)

I use Better Touch Tool to display some numbers on the Touch Bar, which is regularly updated by a cronjob (see example).

Telegram Bot (Push-based)

I use IncomingWebhook_bot to get push notifications of some events. I look forward to these notifications and they always manage to make my day!

My Current Setup

Here are some of the things that I currently track, along with their workflows:

• New Star on GitHub
  Open a repository, go to settings -> webhooks -> add webhook. Enter the payload URL from the bot above and make sure that only the “stars” event is selected. Now whenever someone adds or removes a star from that repository, you’ll get a notification.
• Newsletter Subscribers
  Since buttondown / tinyletter don’t provide webhooks, I use their API to fetch the current subscriber count and display it in my Touch Bar.
• GitHub / Twitter Followers
  Same goes for these sites as well.
• Event Management
  TypeForm supports webhooks so I get a notification on a CFP submission, sponsor interest, invite request, etc.
  AirTable only supports Slack notifications so I’ve linked it to my personal Slack workspace where I get these notifications in a dedicated channel. I had set this up sometime last year and I never touched this setup again.
• Payments
  TownScript, Instamojo, and GumRoad - all support webhooks so any payment made on these sites pops up as a notification on my phone. Sweet!

I’ve felt that having a list of such tiny wins boosts up your morale a lot. Just open it up whenever you’re feeling low and scroll through the events - it’s a magical feeling!

Until We Meet Again…
🖖 swap