Everyday Automation: How Simple Scripts Can Revolutionize Daily Tasks
I was browsing Reddit last night when I saw this thread where people were discussing the self-made tool that they had prepared for their day-to-day use. I got intrigued by this topic and really wanted to see what creative things these people have done. And boy, I was surprised how wonderfully people have used tech to automate their repetitive day-to-day tasks. I was indeed surprised why these ideas never clicked with me more often because they were so simple yet innovative.
One of the guys had created a Python Selenium script to launch Teams web, look into the calendar, and then auto-join the meeting. And to my surprise, this was done by a college kid so that he could attend his online Teams classes back in Covid days. Another guy wrote a script to download subtitles files of the desired movie to the same movie folder. One guy made a script for the stock market analysis in real time (pattern recognition, different plots, etc).
Reading all these reminded me of the similar kind of work that I did for my friend exactly four years back. My dearest college friend and my roommate at that time was working as a digital marketer. One of his tasks was to look for some companies on LinkedIn, and then note down some of the company info like CEO, CTO, employee's strength, domain, etc in an Excel sheet. One fine day when I was sitting idly at our home, I casually asked him about his work and I realized it is much of a repetitive task. Then this idea to automate his stuff stuck with me. I realized, all these activities are quite possible to automate using Selenium.
I quickly opened my laptop and created a new Java project and straight away started with the main business. It took no time for me to write the following code:
- Launch LinkedIn and log in with his credentials.
- Then automate the action to search for a company, click on the first listed search result, and then read the company info which is right there on their main page.
- Then used Apache POI library to write all the info data in an Excel workbook.
So simple, isn’t it? I kind of felt very proud even just doing these little things. I indeed created a solution to a problem here. Just like this, in our daily lives, we can think of automating the boring or repetitive stuff that can bring our learnings into the real world. And of course, it is so much fun doing it. Just sit down and try to think what tool you can create to make your’s or your loved one’s life easier. It can sometimes require us to learn something which we were not aware of, but worth the effort. And the joy which you get after solving a problem is something else and can’t be explained.
Let’s not restrict our knowledge to our professional work only, instead let’s keep exploring the unexplored and challenge ourselves. Who knows something big might be in our way amidst these small steps.
Shiv Jirwankar
SDET
