It all started right after that disaster of a pitch meeting. I thought I had that massive contract locked down, the biggest one of the year, the one that meant the next six months were smooth sailing. Nope. Went home, slammed the door, and just felt like I needed something to tell me what the hell to do next. That whole week I just felt completely lost, floating around, waiting for the floor to reappear.
I’m a Virgo, right? Never really paid much attention to that astrology stuff, always thought it was for people who wore crystals. But when you’re desperate, you start checking everywhere. I typed in “Virgo Weekly Career Horoscope Next Week” and suddenly, pages of advice, promises, and dire warnings popped up. I needed a plan, and the stars seemed as good a place as any to try making one up, even if it was totally ridiculous.
The Obsessive Tracking Phase
I didn’t just read the damn thing once and forget it. I went full-on maniac. My “practice” was tracking. I opened a Google Sheet—yes, I know, the shame—and committed to logging every major site’s prediction for my sign, every single week. I had four different columns for four different places. I even gave the file some ridiculous name like “Cosmic Career Tracker.” I was diligently hunting for those big opportunities the titles always promised.
This whole process was structured around a stupid weekly routine:
- Every Tuesday night, around 11 PM, I’d pour myself a cup of coffee and get to work.
- I’d hit up the three main horoscope sites and one smaller blog—the one that claimed to be “deeply intuitive.”
- I’d manually copy-paste the entire career section, the bits about “money,” “networking,” and “challenges.”
- Then I’d assign a simple, color-coded score: Red for “run away,” Yellow for “vagueness that could mean anything,” and Green for “Go for it, big chance!”
Man, the time I wasted on that routine was criminal. Two or three hours a week, sometimes more, just reading the same spiritual-sounding fluff worded slightly differently. It was always something like “A pivotal energy shift requires you to communicate clearly with a superior” or “Be mindful of minor conflicts with associates as Mercury exits a retrograde phase.” It was total junk, always safe advice, never specific, and always meant to apply to literally everyone on the planet.
I tracked for maybe six or seven weeks, and my sheet was almost all “Yellows.” The only “Green” I ever logged was one site telling me to buy a lottery ticket. I looked at the hours of effort I had put into collecting data that told me nothing, and I had a sudden, sharp realization. The real problem wasn’t the stars; it was the method.
Building the Solution Instead of Following the Advice
That’s when the shift happened. I stopped caring about predicting my future with astrology and started focusing on the technical problem right in front of me. I realized that the actual opportunity wasn’t in some planetary alignment; it was in the data collection itself. I needed a technical skill on my resume, not vague life advice. The practice then became proving I could build a simple web scraping tool.
I spent the next two weeks diving headfirst into learning the basics of pulling text off a webpage. I had to figure out how to parse all that HTML mess and find the exact pieces I wanted. I needed to learn about selectors and figuring out all the stupid XPath stuff, which was a royal pain in the butt and broke constantly whenever a website changed a single line of code. But I forced myself to sit there and debug it until it worked.
I started with the easiest site first, the one that had the cleanest layout. I wrote a little script that would run every Tuesday at 11:05 PM—right when the new week’s stuff usually dropped—and just dump all the “Virgo Career” text into a small, local database. No more copy-pasting. Suddenly, my time commitment went from three hours of reading and manual entry to five minutes, just checking the logs to make sure the script hadn’t blown up.
My database kept filling up with the same empty promises, but I had built something real that worked exactly as intended. It was a tangible, running piece of code. It was living proof I could handle that kind of light scripting, scheduling, and error handling. It was my practice log, and it was entirely focused on development, not divination.
The really funny thing is, that little scraping project ended up being the thing that got me my next job. I went into an interview maybe a month later, and the hiring manager asked about side projects. I told him all about the horoscope scraper. He paused for a second, then totally burst out laughing, but he was genuinely impressed that I took such a dumb, repetitive personal task and found a technical solution to automate it.
I got the job. It pays way more than the old gig I lost, and guess what? I still run the scraper every week. The database keeps filling up with abstract predictions about “finding your true path” while I’m already on it, doing the work. Sometimes, you just have to stop looking at the stars and start building the telescope.
