You know, for someone who spends all day wrestling with databases and cloud functions, the idea of coding an astrology prediction engine felt like a bad joke. But here’s the thing: sometimes you get roped into the weirdest projects just because someone else messed up so badly you feel compelled to fix it.
This whole thing kicked off because of my old landlord, Gary. He runs one of those ridiculous “cosmic wellness” sites that promise enlightenment if you just click the right ad. His weekly reports were awful—generic boilerplate text that looked like it was generated in 1998. He swore up and down that his “proprietary star-gazing algorithm” was the best, but the comments section was brutal. People were constantly complaining that their “Pisces Weekly” report said they should be focusing on their career when they were retired and fighting off a flu.
Gary couldn’t figure out why his system was spitting out garbage. I walked over there, squinted at his PHP setup for about thirty seconds, and realized he wasn’t calculating transits; he was literally just pulling the same five paragraphs of static text every Monday and slapping a date stamp on it. I told him he needed actual, real-time planetary data and transit calculation, not fortune cookie text. He just looked at me blankly and offered me a lukewarm beer to make it work.
Setting Up the Cosmic Data Pipeline
I started this project just to shut Gary up, honestly. I grabbed a throwaway EC2 instance I had lying around—didn’t even spin up anything fancy, just a basic Linux box. My first task was figuring out where the heck to get reliable ephemeris data—that’s the fancy word for planet positions. I spent a few painful days trying to use some highly academic, extremely complicated libraries. They were overkill, bloated, and crashed constantly. I needed simplicity, something that could just run a calculation and spit out an angle.
I finally settled on a combination of Python scripts. I specifically coded a data ingestion script that focused purely on the outer planets and the moon’s position relative to Earth. Why those? Because for a weekly report, the fast-moving Moon and the slower outer planets (which dictate major themes) are where the juicy ‘key dates’ come from. I filtered out everything else to keep the processing quick and dirty. I didn’t want this thing burning CPU cycles.
My first big chunk of work was defining the input. Every report needs a personalized natal chart, right? Gary had a messy spreadsheet of hundreds of names and birth dates. I had to scrape and clean that spreadsheet first, normalizing all the time zones and locations. That task alone took a weekend. Most of the data was incomplete—missing exact birth times—so I had to build a fallback system that just used noon for anyone with unknown data, which is astrologically messy but fine for a quick ‘Pisces Weekly’ digest.
Wrestling the ‘Astroenlightenment’ Logic
Once I had the clean data and the position calculations running, the real fun started: mapping technical calculations to vaguely helpful self-help text. This is where the magic (or the bull, depending on your view) happens. Gary’s specific requirement was the “astroenlightenment” system, which basically meant: focus on manifestation, career blocks, and emotional breakthroughs. Nothing about finances or health, apparently. Too controversial.
I implemented a transit scoring system. It wasn’t genius; it was basically a massive list of if/then statements.
- IF Mars transits the 10th House (Career) AND forms a Square (Challenge) to Natal Saturn, THEN score the ‘Career Block’ theme high.
- IF Jupiter transits the 5th House (Creativity) AND forms a Trine (Easy Flow) to Natal Venus, THEN score the ‘Creative Breakthrough’ theme high.
I developed a text generation framework. Instead of just static text, I built templates. If the score for ‘Career Block’ was high, the script would pick from 10 different pre-written paragraphs about overcoming obstacles at work. The key was random variation and insertion of the calculated key dates. I had to calculate the exact minute of the week when the aspect became exact and then drop that date right into the report text: “Expect this energy shift around Monday, the 17th, when the Moon hits that critical angle.”
Deployment and the Weekly Grind
I didn’t want to mess with setting up a proper message queue or email service. Too much admin. So, I configured a cron job on that cheap EC2 instance. This job fires every Sunday morning at 3 AM. It processes the list of users, calculates the transits for the upcoming seven days, generates the templated reports, and then dumps all the individual reports into a shared S3 bucket. Gary’s terrible PHP site just pulls the files from that bucket when a user logs in.
It’s ugly, it’s not scalable, and it runs on a box that probably needs rebooting, but it works. And guess what? The complaints stopped. The reports actually spoke to the users’ lives because they were built on real, calculated transits, not static nonsense. Gary thinks I’m a wizard; I just think I finally found a practical use for celestial mechanics outside of satellite positioning.
The whole experience, which started out as a favor to get some peace and quiet, actually reminded me of something crucial: even the most ridiculous-sounding business needs a solid backend. You can slap ‘astroenlightenment’ on anything, but if the data underneath is stale, the whole thing falls apart. Now, if you’ll excuse me, my little cron job is about to kick off for the week, and I need to make sure the server isn’t running on fumes again.
