Diary Locker Revisited

I made Diary Locker as I was getting into journaling. Being too lazy to write, I made videos of myself rambling instead. Since I wanted to become a programmer and I wanted to keep my secrets secret, I decided to make a command line utility that would encrypt my videos right after recording them.

Giving it a quick look, I was impressed at the effort I put into it. It has a comprehensive README with instructions, security details as well as the limitations of the script. Making the project, I remember wrangling with how to monitor the file system so that it would only encrypt files once I was finished, creating the command line interface and encrypting the videos themselves.

Trying this out for the first time in 2 years, I’m amazed that it still works. Ignoring a few bugs, it does its job perfectly. Between my various resumes and recounting my programming experience in interviews, I’ve overlooked this project.

Looking at it now, it’s impressive just how much work I put in to make it usable. Sure there were things I could do like package it into a binary, test it across different platforms, make a GUI for it and improve its security, but in all, I’m grateful that I spent my summer making this project. It pushed me out of my comfort zone and got me to think about how to make software for others.