Grandpa Don's Mission Journal

Grandpa Don

My paternal Grandfather, Don Asay, was great. He was a very supportive grandpa to me as I grew up, coming to my soccer games and school plays. As an adult, I called him regularly. I loved hearing about his life, from his childhood in Lovell, Wyoming to his life with my grandma Marilyn who died when I was a baby.

One experience that transformed my grandpa's life was his missionary service in the Philippines from 1964 to 1967. It must've been a crazy experience going to Hong Kong, then Manila after growing up in a town of around 2500. Thankfully, he kept a journal all through his mission.

Don died in 2022, and I scanned every page from his journal after the funeral. I've had the .pngs kicking around on my laptop since then.

Vibe Coding

In the last couple of years, something called vibe coding has come into existence. Vibe coding is where a coder, together with an LLM (AI assistant), writes code much faster than without the help. I have some web development skills, (I took a couple of classes during my undergrad and learned enough to make this site.) but it doesn't come as naturally to me as other coding tasks.

I decided to try and vibe code an interactive viewer so my family and I could read Grandpa's journal whenever we wanted.

To do this, I drew inspiration from interactive document viewers I've seen online before, like the internet archive or Joseph Smith Papers. My grandpa's handwriting isn't always super legible, so I imagined having both the image of the page and a transcription visible for each page. I vibe-coded single-page prototype, but then I needed the data.

The Data

I needed a transcription of each page, so I did a quick search for OCR systems. OCR (Optical Character Recognition) systems turn handwritten words into transcribed digital text. Google Cloud lets you do up to 1000 free pages of OCR each month, so I wrote a little python script that sent each page to Google to be digitized.

The OCR was pretty good, but it needed some human editing. Coincidentally, I wanted to read grandpa's whole journal. I set up a workflow with the picture on half of my screen and the OCR transcription right next to it, and edited each page by hand. Then, I was ready to put the finishing touches on the website.

The Viewer

With all the data ready, I plugged it into the viewer and got cracking on turning the vibe-coded prototype into a finished site. I made a bunch of little changes:

• I made the site mobile-friendly. (even though it works better on a computer)
• I changed a little bit of the page's aesthetics.
• I added a cookie so the viewer remembers what page you left off on.
• The LLM had made a few mistakes, so I fixed those, too.
• There were a few pages of photos at the end of the journal, os I added a seperate viewer for them as well.

The Stories

Obviously, the best part of this process has been reading about Grandpa's experiences. One of my favorite ones was this story of my grandpa getting pulled over by two cops in one day.

Today was district diversion day. Our district went to Bataan. We rented a Jeepny for the 11 of us. There were five sisters and 6 Elders. We stopped in San Fernando and ate. We stopped in Lubao and took pictures of Carabao. We traveled all the way out to Mariveles, where the Bataan DEATH March started. On the way back we got picked up because most everyloody was hanging out the sides of the Jeep. Some Cop in Orion, Batoon stopped us. Sis. Peters was the one that got us off free, I think. She went over and talked to the chief of Police. She batted her big brown eyes at him and asked why not just warn them this time. A few hours later we stopped in Bocame to buy fireworks We stupidly got picked up for throwing them out of the Jeep. Some guy outside of Meychayon saw us and phoned in ahead and we got stopped again. We pleaded guilty but all they wanted was an apology to the guy that saw us. We apologized and left. Our Jeepney driver was so scared he didn't know what to do. It sure was fun, though.

we had a testimony meeting on a beach near Mariveles. It was a wonderful meeting.

This is one of many great stories in the journal. There are others where he gets hit by a truck, or when he dislocates his shoulder horsing around on Thanksgiving. There are a bunch more, but you'll need to discover them yourself!

Conclusion

My first foray into vibe coding was a success, and I'm really glad to have made this. Reading Grandpa Don's journal helped me feel more connected to him, and helps him live on through us. You can read it too over here.

This also made me reflect on how important it is to keep a journal. I love reading my family's journals, and the few journal entries I wrote when I was younger are very valuable to me. We should make an effort to keep and share ours and our families' stories.