My first project
I built this while completing CS50. It takes a person's age, country, and gender and turns an estimated remaining lifespan into a visual calendar of weeks.
The project was inspired by the Stoic idea of memento mori: remembering that time is finite can make the present easier to take seriously.
What happened
I shared it on Reddit and it reached 30,000 users in 24 hours.
The old PythonAnywhere dashboard showed 24,780 visits for the month, and the Reddit post insights later showed 50K total views, 102 comments, and 133 shares.
How it worked
The engineering was early and simple:
- Flask handled the form and result page.
- SQLite stored country/gender life expectancy data.
- WTForms handled basic input validation.
- The browser rendered the week-grid visualization.
The app was not technically sophisticated, but the interaction was clear: enter a few demographic inputs, see time as a finite grid, and feel the idea immediately.
Why I keep it here
Looking back, this was one of those rare moments that divides life into a before and an after. Up until that point, my life was moving in a very different direction and building this project and watching it reach nearly 30,000 people in a single day fundamentally changed how I viewed the world and software. It expanded my sense of what was possible, that software engineering could turn an idea in someone's head into something that impacted thousands of people around the world. It felt like a door that had been shut a long time, swung open. For the first time in my entire life, I could see a completely different future for myself and pursue something worth my existence.