About this project

I developed a bad case of anxiety and depression during the tail-end of grad school, then it worsened during the first few months of 2019. It affected my relationships, career, and faith. That sucks, because it feels like a disease clinging to you and never letting go.

I know that I cannot rid myself of it, but atleast I can manage it. To cope, I started practicing meditation and learned the value of mindfulness. I forced myself to become attuned with my feelings in the present, and accepted them for what they are: it is ok to feel sad, agitated, and anxious for they’re all part of life! It’s a difficult journey, but I’m still alive and kicking!

My experiences in meditation motivated me to discover my thought-patterns and catch myself before things spiral out-of-control. I’ve been jotting down notes and tracking my emotions manually in a notebook, so as an engineer, I asked myself: “Can I use technology to improve this workflow?”

I’ve been a long-time believer of using technology to help other people, and so I realized that I can focus my skills and talents in machine learning and open-source to first help myself. My day job is helping organizations through data, so maybe I’d put some of those skills in myself too.

Paula is personal

Paula is first and foremost a personal tool. I made it to meet specific needs that works for me. However, I’m releasing it in public with the hope that other people will find this useful as much as I did. These tools may not work for you, but I’ll try my best so that you can also set-up Paula easily as any other open-source code.

Paula is open-source

I’m open-sourcing Paula to encourage me in writing and delivering quality software. I admit that my Golang and schema design skills aren’t topnotch, so if you find any code smells, bugs, or incorrect practices, please feel free to create an Issue or make a Pull Request in the Github page. I will also appreciate if you can suggest features that you would like Paula to have, it would be nice to build this project together!

Paula is private

As you will see later on, Paula requires a PostgreSQL database to house collected data. For Paula, this may be in the form of Feel Events, Summaries, or logs. That dataset is yours. You set-up your own database instance and manage your own machine. I do all of these inside Heroku, but you can do it in any platform of your choice (or perhaps even in a Raspberry Pi!).