About a year ago, I started work on czapi a Python library that could be used to scrape the popular curling score website CurlingZone.

czapi was created in another side project of mine where I was developing curling analytics by scraping curling results off of CurlingZone. I decided to publish czapi so I could gain some experience in the open-source ecosystem. For the past year or so, I’ve been developing czapi on-and-off, with other work and life related projects usually taking precedence.

This past Thursday (March 9) though, I received an unexpected email (it’s a bit hard to read):

Someone emailed me asking about czapi and an error they were encountering!

This was a first for me and an unexpected shot in the arm of motivation. The email was from someone I had never met and it was unbelievable to me that someone had searched and found my Python package on the web and had started using it.

I was more than happy to answer their question and published a fix in the library resolving the error they were running into.

I wanted to share this story to serve as an example of how life can sometimes provide gifts when you least expect it. This encounter has re-energized my passion for this side project and I intend to use that motivation to continue making czapi the best it can be.