Feature Creep 2026, 04 - A Mental Math Trainer - Code-Generating Some LaTeX

It's easier for me to write code generators than do infrastructure, so I'll do a little bit of both this week. I am flirting with FastAPI a little, because of the python of it all. It'd give me a regular REST interface that could be just as good as me using JavaScript, but with the aforementioned scipy stuff that I like. The generator should consist of different parts of varying complexity, so it'll get its class that'll know if it includes some x to solve for (or integrate over, or whatever). Perhaps I'll work with some form of complexity flag to filter for some users, though I personally don't think it'll be very high on my priorities.

On the other hand I'll build the fastapi infrastructure. First of all, I'm probably setting a bad precedent about tearing down the entire stack that I initially thought of, but usually the first idea is rarely the greatest. Since I pivoted off a JS backend, I might as well settle for ReactJS in the front-end, because it's definitely going to be a better time than writing express. I'm basically copying the setup from this medium article here, even though I'm not gonna need a lot of the features that are dealt with in here (yet), such as a database integration and login functionality with JWT tokens, but they're nice to have in the architecture already, once I decide I want them around. A lot of this seems like it should be split into several modules one of these days, but for now this shall suffice.

For the first attempt, I'll just use yarn, even though I frankly have no idea what it does, and am unsure its result couldn't be duplicated using bare npm, which I personally would prefer, but I first need a setup that works, and I can worry about how to do an install-script later.