Okay, so I wanted to do something special for my golfer friend’s birthday, he was born on February 5th. I figured, why not combine his love for golf with a little tech fun? Here’s how I went about it.
First, I brainstormed some ideas. I could make a simple birthday card, sure, but I wanted something more… personalized. I thought about maybe creating a little program or script that would generate a unique “Happy Birthday” message, golfer style.
Getting Started
I decided to use Python because I’m kinda familiar with it. I opened up my trusty text editor and started typing away. Initially, my plan was to create a very basic script.
- I imported the
randommodule. I figured I could use this to make things a little different each time the script ran. - I created a list of golf-related terms like “birdie,” “eagle,” “par,” “fore,” stuff like that.
- I also created a separate list of birthday-related messages. “Happy Birthday!”, “Have a great one!”, and similar.
Building It Up
Then, I wrote a simple function that would randomly pick a word from the golf terms list and another from the birthday message list. It would then combine them into a single, slightly goofy, message.
I tested it a few times. I was getting messages like, “Fore! Happy Birthday!” and “Eagle! Have a great one!”. It was okay, I guess, but not super exciting.
Adding the Birthday Date
I thought, “Hey, it’s February 5th!”. So, I modified the script to incorporate the date somehow. I added a line that specifically checked if today’s date was February 5th.
If it was February 5th, the script would print a special, extra enthusiastic message. If not, it would just print one of the randomly generated ones. That way, it would be super relevant when he actually saw it.
The Result
I ran the script a few more times, making sure it worked as expected. I even added a little ASCII art of a golf ball, just for kicks. It took some messing around to get it to look halfway decent.
Finally, I copied the output and pasted it into an email. I added a personal note, hit send, and boom! Birthday message delivered.
It wasn’t anything groundbreaking, coding-wise, but it was fun to put together and, more importantly, personalized for my friend. He got a kick out of it, and that’s all that really matters, right?
