Surfer Sundays - Edition 1🏄🌊

Welcome to the first edition of Surfer Sundays. Was debating whether to call it Surfer Sundays or The Weekly Wave, but I chose the former. Anyways, here we go.

If you’re reading this you probably know/sort of know what Surfer is. But I’ll repeat it again anyway. Surfer is an open-source framework that makes it super easy to get your data and do stuff with that data. Surfer is the same is Surfer Protocol, but it’s just less words to say Surfer.

This week was filled with mostly just building out the Data Exporter and the Python package. I spent most of the time on the exporter and very little time (surprisingly) on the Python package. The super cool thing is that with the Python package, it only takes 4 lines of code to access the exported data:

Once exports are running in the background, the idea is that builders don’t need to worry about the data being maintained and they can focus on doing cool things with the data.

Of course, I couldn’t resist doing the same so I started experimenting with what I could do with this data. I only made basic search for my Bookmarks and very basic Spotify Wrapped for iMessages, but these are just basic things that were super easy to make with Streamlit and when I finish all the desktop app stuff I’ll be making way cooler things:

Some ideas I have are building a universal search bar for all my data (basic, I know) but I’d love to have a hotkey and then a bar pops up from this 24/7 running Desktop app and I just type a few words in and stuff instantly shows up. Doesn’t even need to have AI in it necessarily; full-text search on its own would be very nice. Also, a timeline of all my data would be very cool. I’m imagining seeing myself on this timeline bookmarking a tweet 12:47 pm on Sunday, texting bruh 30 minutes later, and then asking ChatGPT why I’m having an existential crisis later that same day. Anyways, moving onto the exporter.

The Data Exporter worked pretty well, but there was SO much extra code that needed to be removed and extra data structure stuff as well. Luckily I didn’t need to do overhaul auth (again). Also improved the exporting process for Notion and Twitter Bookmarks. Intercepting network requests is REALLY coming in clutch. Basically what I do is I open up dev tools, find the requests, replicate them on Google Colab, and then tell Cursor to implement it. There’s a cool AI agent I found that’s supposed to automate this process, but I haven’t looked too much into it. Unfortunately, the bigStepper function was also removed. Rest in peace, bigStepper, you will be missed 😢😢😢:

Also updated Gmail and it should work better now. But the coolest thing was getting the desktop app working in the background 24/7, which means that Surfer works essentially like a local backend. I knew this was possible because texts.com also does something sneaky where when you close the app, it’s still in the tray table:

So lots of cool things were added this week.

Bookmarks are being buggy with recursively getting new bookmarks, so I need to fix that. I’ll also work on getting the app to launch as hidden on startup and automatic exporting to work in the background (shouldn’t be too bad), and will also be showing the app to a few people this week. Then it’s time to ship a bunch of Surfer wrappers and get people excited about this.

If you made it this far, thanks for reading and hopefully I’ll see you next week.

- Sahil