Good morning, everyone! Happy Monday! It's good to make it another week.
This week was transfer week, which means I'm now writing this from the dungeon apartment of University City. For real, the apartment I'm living in is ginormous! The windows open up into a courtyard, so there isn't too much sunlight. Very fun and different compared to my past few apartments.
My new companion is Elder Hancey. He's from the middle of nowhere near Ogden, and this is his second transfer in the mission. He's been in UC for his first transfer, so this will be his second here. He told me there's nothing to do here, but then I let him know that this will be my seventh transfer in UC. I have complete faith we will find God's elect in San Diego, with a bit of creativity. It helps that I've been around the block a few times, so I have some ideas for UC.
So if you didn't know, I have a pet dog named Holly. She's currently living her bestest life in Utah, waiting for me to return home in a few months. What you might not know, though, is that she actually has a Facebook profile. Throwback to Summer 2023, I was in charge of analytics for the page. I needed a second account to get some data, and so the only reasonable course of action was to create Holly a Facebook account.
She's dropped a few glamour shots on there, but mostly that account has been left untouched. Or has it? You see, over the past eight months, I've written a little program that reminds missionaries to contact their referrals. It uses Holly's Facebook profile to put a list of uncontacted referrals in the zone group chats, and it's been working great! San Diego has a higher contact rate and uses less tithing money because Holly makes the money that is spent more efficient.
But there's a glaring problem: Holly needs me to come home in a few months. Who's gonna take her up the canyon to chase deer if I spend the rest of my days in San Diego? It can't be. So, I wrote a little letter to SLC (it sat in my drafts for like six weeks) explaining how I reverse engineered their systems to automatically pull data from their servers. But guess what? They weren't angry!
I got an email back saying that SLC noticed how much better our mission had been doing at contacting referrals, and that they'd like me to explain how Holly (the system, not the dog) works to the tech team at the MTC. So, a week later I jumped on a Zoom call with two other tech guys and the social media leader for North America and gave my pitch. They told me that they thought it was absolutely brilliant and they'd like to test it out in a few more missions before making it a world-wide change. If this MVP test turns out as successful, it will probably be integrated into the PMG app on every missionary's phone. How exciting.
But for this test, I'll be working with people from the MTC tech team to set up their own Holly to test out in three more missions. That'll be an exciting project for this week.
For the rest of this week, I also reverse engineered how the PMG app worked... Now that I'm a DL I have to report on the goals and numbers from the members of my district into a big spreadsheet every week, which is ridiculous. The numbers are on the PMG app, but we're manually copying these numbers into a spreadsheet? Ridiculous, I tell you. So I fired up an Android emulator, attached a fake CA and HTTP proxy and sniffed all the traffic in between the PMG app and church servers. It turns out their system is stupid easy to replicate, so a few lines of Python later I had a PoC of getting goals and numbers for my district from the PMG app.
To make a long story short, I'm working with President Merritt at potentially automating the whole process so no DL ever has to input these dumb numbers ever again. But in the meantime, I'll be using this to quickly gather everyone's numbers and throw them in my section of the spreadsheet, at least.
We're not teaching anyone yet, but I'll be sure to keep you all in the loop! One of the sisters in my district had a baptism in the YSA. Before people are baptized, they're interviewed by the missionary's DL, so I had the opportunity to meet and discuss the gospel with the best person I have ever met! It's so great to see how the Lord works to find his sheep. It's like getting a front-row seat at the MBA.
San Diego also had our annual air show last week. Lucky for us, the air base is right next to our area so we got a view of blue angels flying overhead all weekend. Every time they'd fly by, we'd quickly cover our ears as the ear-shattering roar passed by. Each time the planes passed, it set off a whole bunch of car alarms. Very funny.
One cool miracle and chicken tender mercy was that God led us to a perfect park to view the airshow and talk with a whole bunch of people. In our daily planning session on Friday morning, Elder Hancey and I were praying to know where to spend our time that day. We felt really drawn to this random park in the corner of our area, and it happened to be exactly where we needed to be that day.
Faith is high, motivation is through our concrete roof, I can't wait.
On to eternal perfection
-- Elder Coxson
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