Daily Check-in: July 31, 2026
Validation on direction, still planning and researching, getting very ready to implement.
Daily Check-in: July 30, 2026
Back on it, validating research agent need, pushing through the struggle...
Daily Check-in: July 29, 2026
Unproductive day
Daily Check-in: July 28, 2026
More planning of the research agent, getting great advice and inspiration
Update: Pivoting to OpenBreweryDB Research Agent
Decision behind pivoting to building a local-first agentic research engine
Daily Check-in: July 27, 2026
The pivot, discovery, and MVP start
Daily Check-in: July 24, 2026
The beginning of a pivot to agentic AI-based project after mentor meeting
Daily Check-in: July 23, 2026
Updated USGS water agent skill, end of week 2 already!
Daily Check-in: July 22, 2026
Inspirational workshops, possible AI skill for USGS Water Quality Portal pivot?
Daily Check-in: July 21, 2026
Progress: Completed the MVP Canvas activity, which did really helped clarify the core scope for my MVP project and even capture ideas for future iterations. I'm feeling much better about a solid path forward. Attended the Storytelling & Pitching with Eve Troeh and learned more about framing and communicating project narratives.
MVP Canvas: Tap Water Quality Dashboard
Further refining the problem/solution vision, building personas, discussing features
Daily Checkin: July 20, 2026
Progress: Attended the weekly kickoff meeting this morning. Over the weekend, refactored and streamlined the PDF table extraction data pipeline architecture after finding data inconsistencies. Designed the pipeline to be modular enough to handle different municipalities and report dates without over-architecting early on. Verified that all currently desired data is extracting as expected, though some manual entry edge cases may remain. Thought more about some data visualizations and the story based on the data I currently have and what I'm finding.
Daily Check-in: July 17, 2026
Made a demo video, found more similar, but closed-data, websites, moving forward with my specific vision
Weekly Reflection: Week 1
Picked a project (Tap Water Quality Dashboard) and made a horrible demo video!
Daily Check-in: July 16, 2026
Set up dev environment, tested `pdfplumber` table extraction
Daily Check-in: July 15, 2026
Notes, research, requesting feedback, moving forward?
Daily Check-in: July 14, 2026
Researching and more questions...
Notes: US Drinking Water Quality
Research on how water quality is measured in the United States
Daily Check-in: July 13, 2026
Researching a TDS water dashboard for coffee/tea. Since data is locked in regional PDFs, I'm evaluating OCR extraction pipelines via APIs vs. local LLMs and checking municipal data availability.