Starting point
The goal was to let a user enter a prompt, generate slide text with OpenAI, and create a Google Slides presentation from that result.
This first phase was mostly about getting the local development environment and external service wiring into a working state.
Environment setup
The first mistake was using the wrong virtual environment activation path. I initially reached for Windows-style paths:
source Scripts/activate
On macOS and Linux, the right path is:
python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate
Small setup errors like this matter because they can hide whether the real issue is Python, Django, package installation, or application code.
Django and database setup
The project also needed Django and MySQL to agree on configuration:
- Database host, user, password, and schema had to match the local MySQL instance.
- Python dependencies for MySQL needed to compile correctly.
- Environment variables had to be loaded consistently.
Once the database connection was stable, the next problem moved to external APIs.
API integration lessons
The Google Slides integration required careful credential handling. The OpenAI part needed prompt structure and response parsing. The Django view had to connect both without losing state between request, generation, and presentation creation.
The practical lesson: build one link at a time. Confirm the virtual environment, then Django, then database, then OpenAI, then Google Slides. Debugging all of them at once makes the failure impossible to read.
