DEV Blog 21 - Project Updates

A comprehensive overview of my Advanced Gospel Initiatives

General sentiment: Woohoo!

Another intense week of programming my PRMNews web app. In the process of working on the frontend (the part you see on the web, see above) I began to debug the many changes that were previously made to the backend ETL process. I found the inevitable bugs and began the tedious journey of fixing them. The problem stemmed from the way that the frontend request data from the database. I’m using a document database (no-sql) called MongoDB Atlas. It natively stores news stories in JSON, a type of structured schema that is much more adaptive than the row vs. column extremely rigid database I used to use called MS SQL Server.

A fascinating thing happened when I was debugging between the front and backends. I learned a new type of development workflow! Crazy! I had Cursor IDE working on the backend, and another Cursor instance focused on the frontend codebase. As I found a problem, I learned how to have the agent create what I’m calling a “handoff document” that can be delivered to the backend agent. That agent then reviews the observations from the frontend agent and then after validating that it is indeed an issue, it will move to resolve it. The handoff went back and forth perhaps half a dozen times with great success. But I was having a weird moment where I found myself trying to “reach consensus” between two different AI agents in two different projects. I was indeed the human in the loop. Funny enough, in AI terminology, I believe I myself exhibited emergent behavior. LOL.

Things are going well. I went from mock data to real data pulled out of the database in just 4 hours Monday morning. That was thrilling to see! I’ve been working hard since then.

IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT

Brothers and Sisters, I’m close enough to needing additional volunteer help. I have several things in mind. If you have a passion for Bible Prophecy and are tired of trolling through dozens of websites looking for news … why don’t you join me in the next steps of development? The news will come to you!

• Keyword Search Volunteers — so, I have 10 categories and 132 keyword/keyphrases that are being used to fetch news that a Watchman or Watchwoman would be interested in reading. I need help to review the existing category + subCategory and the way the words are prepared for the API fetch. It is very logical, actually. For Elon Musk, used in the filter above, it would look like this:
  
  “keyword”: “Tesla OR (Elon AND Musk) OR (electric AND vehicles)”
  
  It makes sense actually. The AND/OR and the way the parenthesis are ordered are what provides the API the scope of the fetch. So, over a period of several meetings, I’d like to have people look at those queries and help me determine if we are getting the correct news scope for that keyword.

• Also, another ground-floor volunteer opportunity I have is to act like a moderator to reject articles that qualified on technical merit, but are not true to the intent of the keyword. A good example of this is when we fetch news for Category = Natural Disasters and subCategory = Earthquake. Oddly enough, I discovered that any time the San Jose Earthquake soccer club was playing it would get imported. Of course, that’s not really correct. So, by scanning the news, almost as a moderator would do, we have a reject status. If 3 people give us a reject, then the article is put into isValid = false — which means it will no longer be available for users.

• Finally, for Scripture experts, I’m gathering verses that support a particular keyword search term. For example: earthquake. Where are these mentioned in the End Times? What I’m architecting is a reverse Scripture search, where a user can pick a verse in the Bible and then use it as a filter. All news stories that pertain to that Scriptural context will be displayed. It’s an incredible educational and/or research tool.

Volunteers will get a free logon and instructions on what and how to do this work.

As I said, there is a ground floor opportunity to get involved early. It not only helps me, but you can play a big role in helping the community. Please pray about this. I’ll talk more about this next week with more details. Don’t contact me yet. I’ll post requirements in more detail soon.

Bible Bench

I did text back and forth with Brother Lee W. Brainard but he was in a busy cafe in Brazil prior to departing for the jungle. Fortunately, we have a catch-up meeting tomorrow morning to talk about some of my preliminary findings. I’m looking forward to catching up with him and hearing about his Amazon adventures!

RKPi5 (Raspberry Pi Project)

RKP5i is idle this week, but testing on WAMPi continues.

PRMNews App

Some of the things I accomplish this week include:

• Ensuring all API routes available in the backend (where the database is reachable) conforms to the requirements of the frontend.

• I was able to get a much better understanding of user interactions and article engagement best practices by using standards from FaceBook, X, and YouTube (two of the largest such I could think of). They established the best practices for how to technically achieve these features and make it highly performant. I am still doing testing, but I am so excited to begin offering insights to users based on these types of analytics. For example, I’m trying to make sure that users can sort by most liked or most upvoted.

• I also did a v1 article detailed view. What’s special about this is that on the right panel next to the full story is metadata like locations, entities, persons mentioned and other facts. I’ll try to remember to give you all a screenshot of what that looks like next week.

• The fly-out filter panel is beginning to take shape and is at a v1 functional level right now. I’ve architected what is known a full-text search so that users can enter a search term and the system will find it. The cool thing is that it can use the article title and the full context of the article. It is something I am still working on and unit testing has still revealed there is more work to be done. But I’ve been learning a lot more about mongoDB Atlas search indexes. It’s just fascinating! Imagine this: how would you like the ability to enter “Yuval Noah Harari” and then get article results across all categories and subCategories? This is possible! Imagine the time you can save by using a feature like this!!

• I got a lot closer to working with a future roadmap item with regard to semantic search. This morning, I solved a specification shortcoming with respect to where the embedding data is located, but once that was resolved it feels like I’m getting closer. I’m just at the very beginning of building a chat bot which will let you enter non-technical query terms and the system will return the best fit results back to you. And yes—I plan to allow voice input! Early days, but I’ve been incredibly encouraged to see such strong progress on something I wasn’t really ready to announce just yet. But it is looking very promising.
  
  CAVEAT - this vector embeddings are new to me as an architect, so there is a lot that can go wrong here. But I think it’s a wonderful chance for me to learn extremely valuable skills so that it benefits my users eventually.

Book 6 - The Dax Hunter Files

Gary and I are doing so well, especially bouncing plot and narrative scope and direction. Our writing assignments which we divvy up each week is very fun. If you could be a fly on the wall listening to us as we discuss how we intentionally align Book 6 with the Word of God, I imagine you would be thrilled. Yes—there is some literary license, but we are trying to make our book missional.

• It educates someone that doesn’t understand what’s happening in the world right now.

• It inspires people to really absorb the TRUTH about what the Word of God says is coming.

• And it will be instructional and model some of the thinking leadership we are trying to provide Tribulation Saints after we’re gone.

By letting people see the characters, follow along the progression of the storyline, we hope to model our best thoughts about how to face it and prevail. We are nearly done with Part 1 and about 60% of the book in rough terms. We’ve begun stubbing-out Part 2, and the frantic action, suspense, and intrigue will continue right through to the end of the book. We spent time outlining how we want to approach the gathering of the coalition of nations in the Ezekiel 38 war. It is hard to put a stake in the ground because the Bible does not provide a great about of detail at times. As you all know, there are multiple positions on the Ezekiel 38 war. But we are following the Word as an utmost priority.

Thank you to those of you who are praying for us! Your prayers are working!

Please support Gary Albyn … it helps me too. I should mention that there is no financial benefit to me. Gary is a personal friends of mine. I just want to step up and help out to the best of my ability.

Support Gary Albyn at these outlets

Gary’s personal website (here)
Go to Barnes and Nobles (here)
Go to Amazon (here)

Long Term Roadmap

[IN PRODUCTION] Rapture Kit 3.1

[IN PRODUCTION] Keychain Rapture Kit

Physical Production and Inventory

Support Roy McFaddin at Keychain Rapture Kit

Go to Keychain Rapture Kit (here)
Go to Facebook (here)

Bible on Blockchain [ON HOLD]

Platform Diversification: [ON HOLD]

Web 3.0 Projects [ON HOLD]

Summary

My prayer requests:

1. I’m requesting prayer for the meeting with Lee Brainard tomorrow. We need extreme insight with some preliminary findings I’ve documented coming from LLM outputs. Remember, we are not asking for AI to interpret Scripture. My goal is to determine how accurately it retrieves verses from a chapter within a book. We need the enemy to be restrained. Brothers and Sisters, my research will be published and peer reviewed. God willing and Jesus tarrying. I believe this could be groundbreaking research. At least that is my goal. To serve the body of Christ that are struggling to understand the limits of AI.

2. Please continue to pray for my efforts with PRMNews app. Folks, it’ intense as I juggle many things in my head at the same time. It’s like coming back to a place I enjoy. The challenge and thrill of software development is near and dear to my heart. I’ve been doing this stuff for a very long time. It really feels good to have such a big product vision under active development.

3. Pray for skilled volunteers for potential roles in helping me. For example, folks that currently do moderator duty, are learned students of the Word, and that are experienced in research would be ideal. Mature Believers that want to put their should in to help carry the load. LOL: No wackos, just normal people please :)

4. Gary and I have had regular assaults in our minds. I had one recently when I wrote a draft of the scene where the Emissary (who is above the Pope) and the Antichrist select the False Prophet. They are unnoticed at first, because the Cardinal candidate is making a sacrifice to Satan and offering worship. These types of scenes are important points to educate readers about likely real life events that will happen after we’re gone. It is dark. But they must know the truth of what Daniel and Revelation say is coming. By trying to use a compelling storyline with a Biblical Worldview, we hope to reach a lot of people desperately trying to figure out what the truth is and how to prevail. We need protection from the enemy. We both really appreciate your prayers.

Thank you all from the bottom of my heart!

#Maranatha

YBIC,
Scott