Stalkmyself.com, parse Gmail exports in the browser thanks to Pyodide

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Stalkmyself.com, parse Gmail exports in the browser thanks to Pyodide

Built using Pyodide [1] (web-assembly-compiled Python), stalkmyself.com lets you convert your GMail inbox into a CSV file summary without relying on any backend service -- everything runs directly in your browser (once you've download an export of your GMail data via Google Takeout [2]). The site also generates some plots of you data automatically, and if you have Amazon.com receipts in your inbox, stalkmyself.com will parse those, too, giving you a separate CSV and a cumulative spending chart. Among friends, this chart has been the crowd favorite to sweat over. Backstory: Stalkmyself.com started originally as a joke with friends about the most terrible startup concept I could come up with. The initial idea was using computer vision to stereotype public Instagram posts, and the first version of stalkmyself.com scraped your Instagram data for you via instagrapi [3] (sans computer vision, all stereotyping was the responsibility of the user). Though I got it working, I didn't feel comfortable releasing a tool that might Instagram accounts banned for bot-like behavior, so I repurposed the site to run on data you can export yourself with first party tools (GMail data exported with Google Takeout). Thoughts on Pyodide: Because this is HN, I figure folks might appreciate thoughts on Pyodide from someone who used it to build a site. Overall, I had a lot of fun with Pyodide. As a data scientist by trade, Python is my bread-and-butter programming language, and being able to run it in the browser feels magical. Even complicated dependencies like numpy and matplotlib run smoothly, allowing for plotting and other complex operations. It's certainly a huge sacrifice of page load time to run the Python interpreter in your website, and developing Python to run in the browser was more of a tightly-coupled experience than I had anticipated (I learned a lot more JavaScript than I wanted to with this project), but for another standalone app I would definitely use it again and recommend it to others! [1] https://pyodide.org [2] https://takeout.google.com [3] https://adw0rd.github.io/instagrapi/